A digital archive reveals how a funding agency cooperated with academics to support the nascent field of genomics

Abstract State-supported research funding agencies are critical to the scientific enterprise. However, it remains unclear how funding agencies cooperate with academic communities to realize common scientific goals. Here, we present a fully digital archive assembled by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), focusing on the nascent stages of “genomics” as a scientific field and the everyday workings of the Human Genome Project and subsequent major genomics projects. We identify early events behind the conception of genome-wide association studies, clarify hitherto obscured factors around funding decisions, and how NHGRI and academics outside NHGRI ensured continuity in technical expertise across projects. The computational models we developed correctly recapitulate how academic experts and NHGRI increased adoption of genomics by jointly deciding which organisms’ genomes to sequence. Taken together, these findings reveal how a funding agency contributed to scientific innovation in a nascent field of science by repeatedly cooperating with the broader scientific community.