On July 7th, 2000, engineers and scientists from UC Santa Cruz published the first draft of the human genome online. In doing so, they beat out private genomics company Celera, ensuring that the human genome would remain un-patented and free and accessible to researchers for the decades to come. Twenty years later, researchers at the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering and the UCSC Genomics Institute are still at the forefront of genomics research, working on projects like cataloging Neanderthal and vertebrate genomes, diversifying the human reference genome, and researching cancer and Covid-19 genomes to identify possible treatments.