James Watson: The immediate objective, over the next 15 to 20 years, is to identify all the human genes. And to begin to home in on the functioning of what they do. To describe the information which makes us human. Now, we’re not going to really understand all the subtleties of this information, which would take thousands of years to unravel. But we’ll at least be able to say, “This is the instruction book.” I think when we get the human instruction book this will, again, be one of these great moments in human history. That man has evolved to the point where he can work out his own set of instructions. This will have lots of consequences because, with this, you’ll be able to do many forms of science faster than we’re now doing them. Also, for people who have a particular rare genetic disease, this will make it so much easier for them to find out which gene is behind it and, hopefully, the actual function of this gene. What protein does it go for? In some of these cases, you always hope, of course, that if you know what’s wrong, you can fix it.