For the third time, a UW faculty member has been awarded the Gruber Genetics Prize. This year's $500,000 cash award went to Professor Maynard Olson for his successful career in the field of genetics.

Olson views this prize as a lifetime achievement award rather than recognition for a particular discovery or breakthrough.

"If these prizes are good for anything, they give a humanized context in which to put a little science out in front of the public," he said.

When Olson began his work on the human genome at the UW in the mid-'70s, working with DNA was laborious, expensive and inefficient.

Olson equates the genetics industry of the '70s to the auto industry prior to Henry Ford's invention of the assembly line. He refers to it as a cottage industry that consisted of a few highly skilled individuals who would be incapable of sequencing the 3 billion base pairs that make up the human genome.

"We had to rethink how we were going to attack this problem," Olson said.

To solve the diffculty, Olson and his colleagues developed methods, processes and algorithms to break apart and analyze manageable portions of the massive human genome.

"The '70s was the birth of methods development," he said.

These methods gave scientists all over the world the ability to trace their particular genome research back to the entire human genome.

To explain the complexity of the project of sequencing DNA and mapping the human genome, Olson uses the analogy of tearing apart millions of identical photos, taking each piece and characterizing it and putting each photo back together one bit at a time.

The tools he developed made mapping the genome possible and led to the creation of the Human Genome Project, which finished mapping the human genome in 2003.

Along with his technical work, Olson successfully fought to keep the human genome data publicly available.

"Anyone in the world can log on to the World Wide Web, and inspect the human genome sequence and relate some new experimental observation or radical idea that they have about human biology back to the same part, or parts, of the genome," he said.

Though Olson received $500,000, he said he does not plan on any major lifestyle changes.

"I'm still going to take the bus," he said.