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Six years ago this week, hundreds of researchers were awaiting the of their landmark study that focused on one thing ⎯ the human genome. In their study, the researchers described the complete sequence of human DNA, the order in which 3 billion genetics bases, or letters, appear along a strand of DNA.

The human genome consists of 3 billion nucleotides or “letters” of DNA. But only a small percentage — 1.5 percent — of those letters are actually translated into proteins, the functional players in the body. The “exome” consists of all the genome’s exons, which are the coding portions of genes. The term exon was derived from “EXpressed regiON,” since these are the regions that get translated, or expressed as proteins, as opposed to the intron, or “INTRagenic regiON” which is not represented in the final protein.

Reading about the discovery of the to colleague Maurice Wilkins made me think about what kind of paper trail today’s leading scientists are leaving. (Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Crick and James Watson for their work on the DNA model.)