  The HGP began officially in October 1990, but its origins go back earlier. In the mid-1980s, three scientists independently came up with the idea of sequencing the entire human genome: Robert Sinsheimer, then chancellor of University of California at Santa Cruz, as a way to spend $30 million donated to his institution to build a telescope when that project fell through; Salk Institute researcher Rene Dulbecco as a way to understand the genetic origins of cancer and other diseases; and the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Charles DeLisi as a way to detect radiation-induced mutations, an interest of that agency since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such a project had become technically feasible due to advances made during the previous decade or two: in the early 1970s, recombinant DNA technologies (use of restriction enzymes to splice DNA, reverse transcriptase to make DNA from RNA, viral vectors to carry bits of DNA into cells, bacterial cloning to multiply quantities of DNA); in the late 1970s, DNA sequencing and use of RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism) markers for gene mapping; and in the early to mid-1980s, DNA synthesis, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and automated DNA sequencing.