Goad solicited the National Institutes of Health for funds to set up a larger and more permanent sequence database. In 1981, the National Institutes of Health issued a competitive request for proposals to establish such a data bank. In 1982, a 5-year $2 million contract to establish and operate the GenBank database was awarded to Goad and his co-workers at Los Alamos (working jointly with Bolt, Beranek, and Newman).