The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete

Olympia Valla / Getty; Nurk et al.; Katie Martin / The Atlantic

The Genomics Institute is leading the way in filling the holes left in the first draft of the human genetic code. While the Human Genome Project was certainly a tour de force, the work left sequence gaps that genomicist Karen Miga calls the “final unknown.” In total, about 8 percent of the more than 3-billion-base-pairs in the human genome has remained unsequenced in the two decades since that first draft.