The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific effort to sequence the entire human genome, that is, to produce a map of the base pairs of DNA in the human chromosomes, most of which do not vary among individuals. The HGP started in the US in 1990 as a public effort and included scientists and laboratories located in France, Germany, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom. Scientists hypothesized that mapping and sequencing the human genome would facilitate better theories of human development, the genetic causes and predispositions for a number of diseases, and individualized medicine. The HGP, alongside the private effort taken up by the company Celera Genomics, released a working draft of the human genome in 2001 and a complete sequence in 2003. The history of the HGP ripples beyond biomedical science and technology into the social, economic, and political.

The Human Genome Diversity Project, or HGDP, was an effort led by US-based scientists to collect DNA from members of Indigenous communities living around the world for the purpose of understanding human history, migration, and evolution. Launched in 1991, and led by Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a scientist at Stanford University in Stanford, California, the HGDP initially had the support of US funding agencies. However, the project eventually lost that support when representatives of Indigenous groups protested the project as being exploitative and fellow scientists accused it of racism. Though the project ultimately failed to collect most of the samples it had originally planned, the HGDP was one of the first attempts by scientists to catalogue worldwide human genetic variation, and the DNA samples it did collect formed the basis of many subsequent research studies concerned with understanding human genetic variation and migration patterns.