© Meron Menghistab for UndarkAn anonymous donor known only as RPCI-11 would prove central to the Human Genome Project. Frozen copies of the RPCI-11 library are seen here at the home of one of the project’s lead scientists.
They numbered 20 in all — 10 men and 10 women who came to a sprawling medical campus in downtown Buffalo, New York, to volunteer for what a news report had billed as "the world's biggest science project."
It was the spring of 1997, and the Human Genome Project, an ambitious attempt to read and map a human genetic code in its entirety, was building momentum. The project's scientists had refined techniques to read out the chemical sequences — the series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs — that encode the building blocks of life. Now, the researchers just needed suitable human DNA to work with. More exactly, they needed DNA from ordinary people willing to have their genetic information published for the world to see. The volunteers who showed up at Buffalo's Roswell Park Cancer Institute had come to answer the call.
Comment: What's perhaps most interesting is how this further supports the notion that the collapse of the Bronze Age seems to have coincided not only with climate change and other catastrophic events, but also plague. These same issues also seem to be implicated in the collapse of civilizations over the millennia, and we seem to be experiencing the rumblings of similar phenomena in our own time: