A multinational research effort designed to identify and map the location of all human genes. The idea of a Human Genome Project began at a 1984 international conference in Utah. Research to decode the human genome began in earnest in 1986, funded by the U. S. Department of Energy. The initial stage of discovering all human DNA codons was completed early in 2001 at a cost of 2. 7 billion dollars. The next phase of research will be to identify the proteins for which these genes code. This decoding of the human proteome will be an even more daunting task than the original Human Genome Project. See genome.