A super-giant leap into the new millennium
In 1999, experts around the world predicted that the human genome would be completely mapped within two years. SickKids was already in the gene mapping game and that very same year the Research took over the management of the worldwide Genome Database (GDB), in support of the Human Genome Project – the international scientific effort to sequence and map human being’s complete genetic material.
SickKids Chief of Research Dr. Manuel Buchwald compared the GDB worldwide mapping initiative to the Hubble telescope project. “Once the telescope was up in space, astronomers could start asking interesting questions. Similarly, once the genome project is completed, a whole new set of questions about how proteins, cells and organs interact will arise.”
The GDB, previously maintained by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, was already accessed by researchers and clinicians worldwide and receiving more than 20 million queries per year when it came to SickKids.
In order to properly support this new high-functioning database and improve the speed and accessibility of the database, SickKids upgraded its computational and bioinformatics programs. The GDB was hosted on a supercomputer donated by IBM and Oracle Canada donated $1.2 million in database tools, software and technical support to restructure the GDB. SGI Canada also donated a supercomputer to SickKids – the biggest and fastest at that time in Canada.
With the acquisition of the GDB and the two state-of-the-art supercomputers the Research Institute remained at the forefront of emerging science just in time for the new millennium.