Tom Harkin: “I must say, when I turned over the gavel to Senator Specter in 1995, there was not even a bump in the road. We always…”

“I must say, when I turned over the gavel to Senator Specter in 1995, there was not even a bump in the road. We always worked together on this. When he took over as chairman, we continued our strong support for NIH and our strong support for the human genome project. As the Senator from Nevada said, it has truly been good bipartisan teamwork. I do not mean to say only the two of us. The members of the committee have been very much involved in this through the years. Looking back now and seeing what has happened gives me goose bumps because when we first started this I checked with some people to find out what it would mean to sequence the human genes. We knew we could map it, but to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of genes, of cold human genome, I asked them how long: Maybe 25 years; maybe we will get it done in 25 years, maybe longer. Even then they did not know if they could really get them all sequenced. So I would talk with Dr. Watson about it, and he would say: No, it may take us that long, but we should start on it; we should not put it off any longer; we should start on it.”