The world's leading teams researching into the human genome were granted the Award. The teams are from The Sanger Centre in the United Kingdom, directed by John Sulston, from the National Human Genome Research Institute, under the leadership of Francis Collins, from Celera Genomics (U.S.A.) led by Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith and from Genoscope in France, under the directorship of Jean Weissenbach.

The complete mapping of the Genome is one of the most ambitious projects in the history of Science. Its conclusion will usher in a new era in the treatment of illnesses. Spectacular breakthroughs in the complete molecular and physiological analysis of genes and their interactions will bring genetic predisposition to suffering illnesses to light, thereby leading to better prevention policies to combat them.

Craig Venter is a veteran of the war in Vietnam, where he served in the medical corps. During the seventies he was a lecturer at the State University of New York, and in the eighties he joined the National Institutes of Health. He left there in 1997 to set up his own company, Celera, a subdivision of Perkin Elmer, and to speed up the complete sequencing of the human genome. In his role as scientific director of Celera Genomics Corporation he has discovered over half the 30.000 human genes that have been discovered. One of his successes was to decipher the complete sequence of the Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.