The human genome project has had an impact on both biological research and its political organization; this review focuses primarily on the scientific novelty that has emerged from the project but also touches on its political dimensions. The project has generated both anticipated and novel information; in the later category are the description of the unusual distribution of genes, the prevalence of non-protein-coding genes, and the extraordinary evolutionary conservation of some regions of the genome. The applications of the sequence data are just starting to be felt in basic, rather than therapeutic, biomedical research and in the vibrant human origins and variation debates. The political impact of the project is in the unprecedented extent to which directed funding programs have emerged as drivers of basic research and the organization of the multidisciplinary groups that are needed to utilize the human DNA sequence.