At the end of June I had the the pleasure of visiting Jochen Rink's fairly new group at the MPI, Dresden. Jochen also works with planarians on some similar topics to us so it was fantastic to talk to him and members of his group about our worms. However, I also had the pleasure of seeing my old friend Pavel Tomanak who continues to perform the most amazing interdisciplinary research, from homemade SPIM microscopes to understanding the evolution of developmental processes (and constraints therein) at the systems level.  Luckily for me also Elly Tanaka, one of the worlds major salamander regeneraton researchers also had some time to give me (as well as quite a grilling regarding our own work).

In February 2001 after an intense 10-year research effort and billions of dollars spent, the journal Nature was first to publish a draft sequence of the human genome. Two years later the project, which was spearheaded by the American Government Department of Energy ended, and the projects goal of developing a reference human genome was achieved.