The Human Genome Project officially began in 1990 as an international effort to map and sequence human DNA. Led largely by institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, and China, it became one of the largest biological collaborations ever attempted. The project transformed genetics, medicine, computing, and debates about identity and inheritance.

The project gave late twentieth-century writers a new metaphorical script for fate, ancestry, illness, and personhood. Poetry and fiction increasingly turned to genes, codes, maps, and sequencing as modern equivalents of destiny, while also questioning whether biological information can ever fully explain the human self.