 But the HapMap project was not without its critics; indeed the biologist David Botstein called it a “magnificent failure” (cited in Hall  2010).[20]  Some commentators, for instance, were worried that the project is nothing more than a make-work project filling a gap that the finished HGP left behind, and therefore a waste of precious funds (Couzin 2002). But more often, criticism of the HapMap project was part of wider debates about the way post-HGP research should be conducted. The HapMap project can therefore provide a useful window on some of the key tendencies and disputes that marked (or marred) the post-HGP era.