In 1990, the Human Genome Programs of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy (DOE) joined in a research project which set goals for the first five years of the United States genome project (NHGRI, 1993). Its specific goals were to complete the 2-5 cM human genetic map, complete a sequence tagged site (STS) physical map of the human genome, and to sequence the DNA of the human genome. This quickly developed into a cooperative international study, the Human Genome Project (HGP), an international effort to map and sequence all the genes of the human genome, which was completed in April, 2003 (NHGRI, 2004). The HGP has also been instrumental in developing technology for use in genomic analysis, and for training the scientists to work on the HGP.
The initial steps were the physical mapping, which generated sets of overlapping DNA fragments that span regions of chromosomes or whole chromosomes (Collins and Fink, 1995). The next step was producing a DNA sequence map, which determines the order of the three billion nucleotides that make up the human genome. The NIH, which created the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in 1989, and the DOE, along with many universities and other research facilities, both in the United States, and from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and China, have worked together to complete the HGP.
Because of the enormity of the importance of the outcome of the HGP, quality control is a key factor in ensuring that reliable results are obtained which can be replicated in any laboratory throughout the world. To aid in this area of the research, the Division of Extramural Research (DER) for NHGRI was established to support and manage the roles of the NIH in the HGP, to set the scientific priorities to be followed for HGP research, and to supervise peer-reviewed research projects on the human genome (NHGRI, 2004). The DER is advised by the NHGRI National...