The Genome War

An introductory video which sets the stage for a Darwin’s Spectre blog: The Suicide of Reductionism. It all started with bureaucrats in Washington, DC, looking for a megaproject as the Cold War was winding down. They wanted something on the scale of the Manhattan Project and the nuclear weapons industry, something that would fund government bureaucratic salaries for decades. Unwittingly, they instead inadvertently started the genomics industry, the foundation of biotech in our time. Genomics in turn undermined the reductionist premises which were used to sell their Human Genome Project.