Who first noticed the tech was ready for human genome sequencing? (that was then, this is now)

Perkin Elmer’s last purchase had been a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company called PerSeptive Biosystems, a protein-analysis enterprise started by Lebanese-born wunderkind Noubar Afeyan seven years earlier, when the ink was still wet on his Ph.D. from MIT. Afeyan had sold his company to Perkin Elmer for almost $400 million. The deal had yet to be finalized, and formally speaking Afeyan wasn’t yet a Perkin Elmer employee. But he was at the meeting in Foster City, too. Like Lipe and Barrett, he shared White’s vision of “moving up the food chain” and getting into the genetic information business. But like them, he didn’t really have a clear idea how that was to be done.

It was Afeyan, the newcomer, who first said the words. The head of the multicapillary-machine production team was winding up a presentation on the instrument’s design and capacity. There were twenty-odd people around the table, discussing such matters as pricing, costs, and marketing strategy. This was the first time Afeyan had heard that the project even existed. He was taking some notes and idly doing some calculations. “You know, with enough of these machines, we could sequence the whole human genome,” he remarked. A few people chuckled at the notion, and the discussion returned to serious topics. But now Hunkapiller was hunched over his yellow pad, scribbling. After a minute he looked up. “He’s right,” he said. “Who’s right?” asked White. “Noubar. With two hundred machines, we could sequence the human genome in three years.” Most people in the room hardly knew Noubar Afeyan, but they knew Michael Hunkapiller. He would not interrupt a serious discussion except for something even more serious.

That is from James Shreeve’s The Genome War, here is more detail from the NYT in 1999, and for the pointer I thank Patrick Collison.  Of course that is the same Afeyan Noubar who co-founded Moderna and now chairs it, here is my earlier CWT with him.

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