As announcements go, it was out of the ordinary; almost simultaneous press conferences throughout the world - Washington, London, Paris - as scientists and politicians marked a day unprecedented in the history of humankind.
The peace that unexpectedly broke out between two rival research teams attempting to unveil their version of the human genetic code was sealed by President Clinton, who declared: "Today we are learning the language in which God created life."
He was joined via satellite link by the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, who heralded "the first great technological triumph of the 21st century". Some commentators said the draft versions of the entirety of human DNA, courtesy of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and Celera Genomics, a private corporation, was the biological equivalent of landing a man on the moon. This "book of life" may be most important scientific advance since the Apollo lunar landings, but its significance is far greater.
For it will soon amount to "the complete set of biochemical instructions describing how the human body is made and maintained", once the HGP tidies up its working draft during the next two years and Celera clears up some anomalies in its map.
The totality of the work will transform medicine beyond recognition, albeit later rather than sooner. New drugs will be developed for previously untreatable diseases, and ways found to replace or repair faulty genes.
Treatments will be tailored to an individual's genetic make-up and doctors will be able to predict the future of their patients with much greater certainty.
Some cancers will be eradicated. In the latter half of the century inherited diseases may be eradicated by knocking rogue genes out of the gene pool.
But it may not be as simple as this, as other research shows many genes may be involved in some diseases, and be part of a complex interaction with their environment.
In the meantime, determining the exact meaning of a vast amount of information - the equivalent of a new foreign language with some 50,000 words - is the primary task, and a frenetic search has already begun to identify the "active" rather than the "junk" genetic components; the ones that are pivotal in human health. The most vexatious issue - who owns the human genome? - remains largely unresolved.
The human genome race exposed the tension existing between publicly-funded research and "for-profit" science. The HGP is a collective involving 16 different institutions from six countries, led by the US and Britain. The publicly-funded consortium has operated since 1990, committed to making its data freely available for the good of science and humankind. But in 1998 the brilliant maverick, biochemist Dr Craig Venter, surfaced.
His objective was to patent genes and sell the information to pharmaceutical companies with a slogan "speed matters - discovery can't wait", and armed with the most advanced DNA "sequencing" technology available. Before fast computers, a DNA sequence 12,000 bases long - the equivalent of a relatively small amount of genetic material - took more than a year to assemble. Supercomputers changed everything. Three years ago working out a 12,000-base sequence took 20 minutes. Today it takes just one minute. His company, Celera Genomics then said it would the first to unravel the human genome. Relations with HGP soured last year after negotiations on collaboration broke down and acrimony dominated the race up to earlier this month.
It was not just about being first but also the quality of research and whether it would be freely available. A pact on a joint announcement emerged as the immensity of their endeavours was eventually allowed dictate. Political pressure and Celera's acceptance of commercial realities played a part in defusing the confrontation.
The gold-rush, none the less, has begun with two US biotech companies seeking rapid commercialisation of the information, notwithstanding the HGP's team determination to have the genome available free of charge. Millennium Pharmaceuticals is forming an alliance to develop gene-based treatments for inflammatory diseases such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis, while Human Genome Sciences is to start clinical trials of a protein which activates the immune system to fight infection some scientists believe genomically identified proteins have the potential to be more appropriate than those generated by medicinal chemistry and enable clinical trials to begin on new therapies a lot quicker than at present.
Dr John Sulston, director of the Wellcome Trust-funded Sanger Centre in Cambridge, where a third of the genome was sequenced, said the point in human history had been reached "where for the first time we are going to hold in our hands the set of instructions to make a human being" - with obvious philosophical implications for the way we think of ourselves.
He added: "I for one didn't want my genetic information to be under the control of any one entity, any one corporation. We had to fight, sadly. On the other hand I was proud to do it. It hasn't been easy, but today we are announcing a number of announcements which mean that the fighting is over."
Both the HGP scientists and Celera used similar techniques to sequence the genome but applied them differently. HGP used blood and sperm samples combined from several anonymous donors. Celera placed an ad in the Washington Post, selected 30 men and women, and used about 10 of them - humans are about 99.9 per cent the same genetically, and their collective work will eventually explain how that 0.1 per cent makes each individual unique.