We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.
On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton stood at a White House podium beside British Prime Minister Tony Blair to announce the completion of the first working draft of the human genome. Clinton called it "the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." The scientists who made it possible stood behind him—representatives of a consortium spanning twenty countries and thousands of researchers.
Most of their names you've never heard.
In the audience sat Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, who had raced the public consortium to sequence the genome using private funding and proprietary methods. Venter had promised to finish first, patent the results, and build a business empire on human genetic code. He became famous. He graced magazine covers.
Some scientists yearn for the spotlight the way golden retrievers yearn for tennis balls. Venter was their patron saint. Most researchers labor in fluorescent-lit obscurity, publishing papers read by eleven people (six of whom are their co-authors), while Venter was being photographed for Time with his collar artfully unbuttoned. The rest of the scientific community watched with the quiet resentment of someone who brings a homemade casserole to a potluck only to watch everyone crowd around the guy with store-bought sushi.
But the question worth asking, two decades later, isn't who got famous. It's whose work lasted.
The 1990s forced a confrontation between two visions of meaningful work. One path led to patents and personal glory. The other led to cathedrals.
Consider Linux. In 1991, a Finnish graduate student named Linus Torvalds created a free operating system kernel and released it to the world. He didn't patent it. He invited thousands of programmers to improve it collectively, contributing without compensation. Each programmer was a stonemason adding their stone to a structure they would never fully control.
At the same time, Microsoft was becoming the most valuable company on earth by doing the opposite—protecting proprietary code, making Bill Gates the richest man in the world. Gates became so wealthy he eventually pivoted to solving malaria, which is what happens when you run out of normal things to buy. Torvalds, meanwhile, continued wearing cargo shorts and responding to kernel update threads with the enthusiasm of a man who genuinely finds memory allocation fascinating. One got a foundation. The other got ninety-six percent of the world's servers. It's not entirely clear who won.
Linux now runs the vast majority of internet infrastructure. Android is built on Linux. Cloud computing—Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure itself—runs on open-source tools built by programmers whose names you'll never know.
They were building a cathedral. Most of us just didn't notice because we were watching the people who held the patents.
The Human Genome Project forced a direct confrontation between these visions. The public consortium could have pursued patents. Individual researchers could have held back discoveries to publish under their own names first. The competitive pressure was immense.
Instead, they adopted the "Bermuda Principles." Genetic sequence data would be released within twenty-four hours of assembly. Not after publication. Not after patent applications. Within twenty-four hours.
Craig Venter thought this was foolish. He raised $300 million in private funding and raced ahead. Venter operated with the urgency of a man who believed that credit, like yogurt, had an expiration date. Every day the public consortium stayed ahead was a day his name wasn't attached to the discovery. We all want to be the one holding the trophy, not the one who organized the award ceremony. The difference is most of us aren't racing to decode the fundamental instructions for building a human being.
He got famous. He got rich. The public consortium got the cathedral.
Today, Celera's proprietary database is largely forgotten. The patents expired. The company dissolved. Meanwhile, the freely available genome sequence has been accessed billions of times. When BioNTech and Moderna developed COVID-19 vaccines in record time, they built on decades of freely shared genetic data. The collective work—that cathedral built stone by stone—saved millions of lives.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He could have patented it. Legal experts estimated a patent could have made him the richest person in history. He gave it away instead.
Today Berners-Lee is worth about ten million dollars, which sounds like a lot until you realize that if he'd patented the web, he could have bought Belgium. Not property in Belgium—Belgium. Every waffle. Every chocolate. Every grey-suited bureaucrat in Brussels. Instead, he has a comfortable house and the satisfaction of knowing that every cat video, every conspiracy theory, every passive-aggressive email marked "per my last message" exists because he chose not to charge admission.
You cannot build a cathedral if only one person owns the right to lay stones.
This isn't a call to abandon ambition. Individual recognition has its place.
But there's a difference between receiving credit for good work and organizing your entire life around the pursuit of individual distinction. The danger isn't ambition—it's when personal branding becomes the only metric for meaningful work.
The medieval masons who built Chartres Cathedral are anonymous. We can't even replicate their techniques—including the specific cobalt mixture that produced the legendary blue glass. Somewhere around 1220, a craftsman figured out the precise combination, and he apparently told no one. Not his apprentice, not his wife. He just went to his grave with the recipe locked in his head. If there's an afterlife, I hope someone's sitting him down and saying, "Seriously, Henri—you couldn't have written it down?"
But his cathedral still stands. The light still pours through that impossible blue.
The genome was sequenced by thousands of unnamed researchers. The web was built by millions of anonymous contributors. The cathedrals took centuries and countless hands.
The patent expires. The name fades. The cathedral endures.
When you're choosing between projects, between visions of your work—it's worth asking yourself: Am I building something with my name on it, or am I laying stones in a cathedral?
Both have their place. But only one lasts forever.
John
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