George Church, a Harvard geneticist and pioneer in developing gene-sequencing technology, is spearheading the Personal Genome Project, a nonprofit effort to make both the DNA sequence and the health records of many individuals publicly available.

The project, which is now recruiting 100,000 people to have parts of their genomes sequenced, aims to serve as a test bed for technological, security, and ethical issues that might arise with the growing personal-genomics field.