  The official date of completion was timed to coincide with celebrations of the 50th anniversary of James D. Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. On 12 April 2003, heads of government of the six countries which contributed to the sequencing efforts (the U.S., the U.K., Japan, France, Germany, and China) issued a joint proclamation that the “essential sequence of three billion base pairs of DNA of the Human Genome, the molecular instruction book of human life,” had been achieved (Dept. of Trade 2003). HGP researchers compared their feat to the Apollo moon landing and splitting the atom, foreseeing the dawn of a new era, “the era of the genome” (NHGRI 2003).