Research funding agencies supported by taxpayer dollars do more than write checks — they help build entire scientific fields, reveals a new Northwestern University study recently published in Nature Communications.

The study details how Northwestern scientists and National Institutes of Health (NIH) historians developed software that extracts and connects information across thousands of documents in a publicly accessible digital archive of the Human Genome Project (HGP). In 2023, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) created the archive of the HGP, a landmark international research effort between 1990 and 2003 that successfully mapped and sequenced the entire human genetic code (roughly 3 billion DNA base pairs).

Using the new software, the scientists revealed how federal funding agencies did more than distribute money. They helped guide the development of genomics by coordinating scientific communities, supporting the scientific workforce, developing shared research infrastructure and helping resolve technical challenges that no single laboratory could manage alone.

NIH leaders were directly involved in solving technical problems, coordinating large-scale collaborations and ensuring continuity of expertise across successive projects, the study found. Continuity of personnel within NIH also was important to preserve expertise between projects, said the co-corresponding author.