As the microprocessor revolution was sweeping Silicon Valley in the Seventies, and tech giants Apple and Microsoft came into being, a silent revolution was gathering steam in the world of molecular biology. In 1976 a team of researchers in Harvard, led by future Nobel winner Martin Gilbert, was inaugurating the genomic era with a project that sought to develop a dependable method to sequence DNA. A continent away, at the University of Cambridge, another team headed by Frederick Sanger was