Q: In March of last year you published a complete genetic sequence for Drosophila melanogaster. How does it feel, at the end of the 20th century, to complete one of the tasks begun by American scientist Thomas Hunt Morgan at the beginning of the century?

DR. RUBIN: It’s been very rewarding for me for a number of reasons. One reason is just finally getting it completed, as I’ve been working on it since 1992. The project has been more involved and a little more difficult than I originally expected. I feel satisfied that it’s almost done, and when it is, I’ll be able to move on with my life.

Another reason is that the Drosophila project was intriguing from a technological point of view. I received my Ph.D. in 1974 for sequencing a 158-base RNA. Now, even at a small genome center such as Berkeley’s, we sequence the equivalent of 5,000 of my Ph.D.’s per day. And in some places it’s probably 500,000 of my Ph.D.’s per day. It’s satisfying to see the technology advance so much in a 25-year period.

I also think it was a chance to pay something back to the Drosophila research community. I felt this was an opportunity to do something akin to becoming a dean or department chair. Running a project like this is much more of a management challenge, or a management achievement, than a scientific challenge or achievement. It’s very different from what I had been doing as an individual scientist running a small research lab.

I had run a lab for a long time. I started as a professor in 1976 and trained a lot of people. I had been doing this kind of individual R01-style work, looking at one small project and working on it with a group of people, for quite awhile. It got to a point where there were a lot of people doing that, and many of the people I trained were doing it very well. I felt that the Genome Project [the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project is part of the U.S. Human Genome Project effort] was an undertaking to which I could make a unique contribution, because I was well enough established in my career that I could afford to take on a project like this. The project plays to my strengths, which are in management as well as science. Scientists who can manage and keep track of large projects are a subset of the larger group of good scientists. I think that within the fly community I was one of the few people who could have played this role on the project. I knew what I was getting myself into, and I’m glad I did it. I have no regrets—but I’m glad it is done.