Interviewee: James Watson. Nobel Laureate James Watson talks about the excitement and fear evident in early discussions about the Human Genome Project. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Money > Money was on everyone's mind)

People were very excited because it was, you know, we now knew how, both to sequence DNA and we knew how in principle to find the locations of the genes along chromosomes. And what you needed was a combination of clever ideas and a lot of money. Money was clearly in everyone's mind, were you going to be able to afford it. At that time to work out a letter was ten dollars a base pair, so it was a thirty billion dollar project, and that began to look gigantic, that was much more than, you know, our medical research budget for three or four years. And so no one who was currently being supported by the Government wanted to lose their money for the Human Genome Project.

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