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Former US president Bill Clinton called it the “most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind”. To then UK prime minister Tony Blair, it was a “breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier and into a new era”. His science minister David Sainsbury said: “We now have the possibility of achieving all we ever hoped for from medicine.” When Nature published a 62-page article on 15 February 2001 titled 'Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome' it is not difficult to see why the world got excited. Perhaps, even, a little overexcited. One of our editors, Henry Gee, penned a newspaper piece at the time that promised, by 2099, “genomics will allow us to alter entire organisms out of all recognition, to...