Wally Gilbert

[SageSigh]

I think it was the third or fourth year of the original GSAC Hilton Head conference. We were as a community debating whether or not to begin a global effort to sequence all the genes from a single person. I think the word 'genome' had not quite been coined yet. At that meeting there was a panel discussion, which turned into a debate of sorts with the audience involved about whether or not such a project should be started. Wally Gilbert stood up and explained that we must, and further prophetically explained that new technologies would emerge that would drive the cost of sequencing dramatically down in a similar fashion as the semiconductor industry. Those were the days of manual slab gel sequencing. My recollection was that his argument sealed the debate, at least in my mind. The concept of sequencing a genome as inexpensively as we can now seemed so far fetched at the time. And yet, Wally foresaw all of this. I believe that session of the conference may have been recorded or filmed, and wonder if those film archives still exist. If so, who might have this pivotal and arguably treasured moment in history?