Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering, or MAGE, is a genome editing technique that enables scientists to quickly edit an organism’s DNA to produce multiple changes across the genome. In 2009, two genetic researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, Harris Wang and George Church, developed the technology during a time when researchers could only edit one site in an organism’s genome at a time. Wang and Church called MAGE a form of accelerated evolution because it creates different cells with many variations of the same original genome over multiple generations. MAGE made genome editing much faster, cheaper, and easier for genetic researchers to create organisms with novel functions that they can use for a variety of purposes, such as making chemicals and medicine, developing biofuels, or further studying and understanding the genes that can cause harmful mutations in humans.

George McDonald Church studied DNA from living and from extinct species in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Church helped to develop and refine techniques with which to describe the complete sequence of all the DNA nucleotides in an organism's genome, techniques such as multiplex sequencing, polony sequencing, and nanopore sequencing. Church also contributed to the Human Genome Project, and in 2005 he helped start a company, the Personal Genome Project. Church proposed to use DNA from extinct species to clone and breed new organisms from those species.

Launched in 2002, the International HapMap Project was a collaborative effort among scientists from around the world to create a map of common patterns of genetic variation in the human genome. HapMap stands for haplotype map. A haplotype is a stretch of DNA nucleotides, or letters, that individuals inherit as a block because they lie relatively close together along a chromosome. For any particular region of a chromosome, there may be multiple different haplotypes present among humans, each characterized by a slightly different DNA sequence. By collecting and sequencing the DNA of initially 270 individuals from several different geographic regions, HapMap scientists were able to identify common haplotypes that exist among those individuals, as well as reliable markers to distinguish them. That collection of haplotypes and identifying markers—the HapMap—provided a shortcut for researchers who wanted to identify associations between those inherited DNA variants and particular human traits, especially common, complex diseases like heart disease and cancer.

The 1,000 Genomes Project, which began in 2008, was an international effort to create a detailed and publicly accessible catalog of human genetic variation to support medical studies aimed at exploring genetic contributions to disease. Project scientists sequenced the entire genomes of 2,504 individuals from around the world—more than the 1,000 originally planned. The Project extended the results of the International HapMap Project, a prior effort at cataloging human genetic variation that ran from 2002 through 2010. Whereas the HapMap identified common genetic variants, meaning specific DNA sequences present in five percent or more of individuals in a population, the 1,000 Genomes Project identified genetic variants present in as few as one percent of individuals in a population. By assembling a larger catalog of DNA sequence variation than had previously existed, the 1,000 Genomes Project paved the way for researchers to more precisely locate disease-related genetic variation passed from parent to child.