The Mapmaker of the Human Genome

In June 2000, geneticist Francis Collins stood in the East Room of the White House and announced that his team had completed the first draft of the human genome — three billion letters of genetic code, the biological blueprint of a single human life. Collins, who had once been an atheist, called it "the language of God." He later wrote that peering into that sequence felt like reading a manuscript that had been authored with breathtaking intentionality, every nucleotide placed with purpose.…