The Human Genome Project (HGP) became one of the greatest exploratory projects of all time, and it didn't even help us to discover some distant planets or galaxies, it didn't show us other universes or dimensions, but it was an essential research effort to sequence and map all of the genes (or genome) of members of our species, Homo sapiens.

Francis S. Collins was appointed the director of the Human Genome Project in 1993. This project was a joint effort by the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. His predecessors included James Watson who had helped discover the double helical structure of human DNA. The announcement of the mapping of the human genome was made in 2000 and the scientific results were published in the Feb. 15, 2001, edition of the journal "Nature".

More Info: www.genome.gov