454 Life Sciences was founded by Jonathan Rothberg[2] and was originally known as 454 Corporation, a subsidiary of CuraGen. For their method for low-cost gene sequencing, 454 Life Sciences was awarded the Wall Street Journal's Gold Medal for Innovation in the Biotech-Medical category in 2005.[3] The name 454 was the code name by which the project was referred to at CuraGen, and the numbers have no known special meaning.[4]