When Chandra Theesfeld, a research scientist at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, was starting her career as a biologist, she knew that studying the human genome came with significant challenges. At the time, high-quality curated databases could help those scientists studying smaller organisms, like yeasts and worms, but nothing remotely comparable existed for humans. As a result, human genomic studies tended to be piecemeal and limited in scope, narrowly focused on just one or a few human genes. Scientists often relied heavily on what they remembered from the literature to make meaningful inferences from the available data.
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