BUT NEW FINDINGS must be interpreted. What does it mean when four moons are found orbiting Jupiter—or when a 779-letter DNA sequence on the human x chromosome turns out to be identical, letter by letter, to sequences in rats and mice?

Philip Green, an HHMI investigator at the University of Washington, is one of the scientists trying to make sense of genomic data. A mathematician turned geneticist, Green is uniquely qualified for the task. He has spent years analyzing DNA sequences, and the characteristic motifs of DNA have become engrained in his psyche, so that at a glance he can identify meaningful patterns in sequences that look like gibberish to anyone else. He writes relatively few papers—often just one or two a year—but his counsel and judgment are widely sought. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001, Green received a Gairdner International Award in 2002 for his contributions to the sequencing of the human genome. Genetics labs around the world use two software programs he wrote in the early 1990s to analyze the outputs of DNA sequencers—an appropriate legacy for someone working in a city teeming with software engineers. “He’s the smartest guy in this field,” says Robert Waterston, head of the University of Washington’s department of genome sciences.

Green has taken on one of the toughest problems in biology: identifying all the functional elements in human DNA. Biological systems are both fantastically complex and inherently variable. Biologists agree that analysis of the genome will yield profound insights, but they disagree about where those insights will lead. "That's what makes these years so exciting," says Green, "finding all the genes and understanding what they do."

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