The HGP’s value in science is unparalleled. It is sometimes equated to man landing on the moon. It is believed to be a science that will provide the foundation for much of 21st century medicine. It is its social construct that holds important lessons for all science policy. From its inception, the HGP has been a model for inter-agency and international cooperation. It is hailed as an unprecedented success in terms of the scope for collaboration between scientists of different nations. The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium included hundreds of scientists at 20 sequencing centres in China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the US.

Although spearheaded by the US, it is the international contributions that have propelled it forward. The single largest public-sector sequencing centre in the world is not in the US but in the UK: the Sanger Centre. In the context of climate change, it is this kind of collaboration that will serve humanity better — much more effectively in fact than countries fighting over commas, full stops and text that ends up meaning very little.

There will be, in the forms of technology transfer that are being debated now, several insurmountable problems: the actual deployment, the investment flows and a regulatory framework required for the various technologies will take years to be figured out.

However, it is not hard to imagine climate change policymakers proving far more efficient if they follow the HGP model of collaboration. The scientists in China and India are as competent to find low carbon solutions as their western counterparts. Take the case of fine-tuning technology that will help replace carbon-emitting petrol and diesel with clean hydrogen. There have been significant initiatives in the past by private companies, but they just don’t add up. The technological gap between nations is too wide. Why should Indian scientists be working on the storage solution (a big technological challenge with hydrogen) when it has already been resolved by a Toyota engineer?

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