June 26 in History

Two rival teams, one publicly funded and one privately financed, stood side by side at the White House and announced they had read the book of human life. On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton hosted Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project and Craig Venter of Celera Genomics to jointly announce the completion of a working draft of the human genome, mapping approximately 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA that constitute the genetic blueprint for a human being. The race between Collins and Venter had been one of the most intense scientific competitions since the Space Race. The Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 with a projected cost of $3 billion and a fifteen-year timeline, used a methodical approach called hierarchical shotgun sequencing. Venter’s Celera Genomics, founded in 1998, employed a faster and cheaper whole-genome shotgun method that critics in the academic establishment initially dismissed as unworkable. The competition accelerated both efforts enormously, with the public project advancing its timeline by years. The draft genome revealed several surprises. Humans have far fewer genes than expected, roughly 20,000 to 25,000 compared to earlier estimates of 100,000. More than 99.9 percent of the genome is identical across all humans, demolishing any genetic basis for racial categories. Large portions of the genome consist of repetitive sequences and mobile genetic elements, the so-called "junk DNA" that scientists would later discover plays critical regulatory roles. The practical impact took longer to materialize than the initial hype suggested. Predictions of personalized medicine and rapid cures for genetic diseases gave way to a more complex understanding of how genes interact with environment and each other. But the genome project did revolutionize drug development, cancer treatment, and forensic science, and the cost of sequencing a human genome has plummeted from $3 billion to under $1,000, enabling applications that were unimaginable in 2000.

A cashier at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum at 8:01 AM on June 26, 1974, and retail was never the same. The transaction at Marsh Supermarket was the first commercial use of a Universal Product Code barcode, a technology that had taken more than two decades to develop and would eventually process trillions of dollars in commerce worldwide. The barcode concept originated in 1948, when a Drexel University graduate student named Bernard Silver overheard a supermarket executive begging a dean for a way to automate checkout. Silver and his classmate Norman Joseph Woodland began experimenting with patterns of lines and dots, eventually patenting a circular bulls-eye design in 1952. But the technology to read the codes reliably and affordably did not exist. Laser scanners, the essential missing component, would not become commercially viable for another twenty years. The modern UPC barcode emerged from an industry-wide effort in the early 1970s. The grocery industry formed an ad hoc committee to select a standard symbol, and IBM engineer George Laurer designed the rectangular striped code that was ultimately adopted. The system assigned a unique twelve-digit number to every product, with the stripes encoding that number in a pattern readable by laser scanners at any angle. The Marsh Supermarket pilot was closely watched by the industry, which needed proof that the technology would actually speed up checkout and improve inventory tracking. Adoption was slow at first. Scanners were expensive, and manufacturers resisted the cost of printing codes on packaging. By 1978, fewer than one percent of American grocery stores had installed scanners. The tipping point came in the early 1980s, when large chains demonstrated that barcode scanning reduced checkout time by 30 percent and virtually eliminated pricing errors. Today, barcodes are scanned more than six billion times daily worldwide, and the technology spawned the QR codes, RFID tags, and supply chain tracking systems that define modern commerce.

Two FBI agents drove onto the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to serve a warrant and never came out alive. On June 26, 1975, Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were killed in a shootout near the small community of Oglala, along with a young Lakota man named Joe Stuntz Killsright. The incident became the most controversial law enforcement confrontation of the 1970s and produced one of the most disputed convictions in American legal history. Pine Ridge in 1975 was a war zone. A violent power struggle between supporters of tribal chairman Dick Wilson and members of the American Indian Movement had torn the reservation apart since the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. More than sixty people had been killed in factional violence over the previous two years, and FBI agents were a constant and resented presence on the reservation. AIM members, many of them armed, had established camps on properties belonging to sympathetic families. Coler and Williams entered the Jumping Bull compound following a red pickup truck they believed was connected to a suspect wanted for assault. Gunfire erupted almost immediately, and the two agents, armed only with handguns against rifle fire from multiple positions, were quickly pinned down. Coler was wounded early in the exchange. Both agents were shot at close range after being incapacitated, their weapons taken by the attackers. More than 150 FBI agents and law enforcement officers eventually descended on Pine Ridge, but the shooters escaped into the hills. Leonard Peltier, an AIM activist, was convicted of the murders in 1977 and sentenced to consecutive life terms. His trial has been challenged for decades by supporters who argue that key evidence was fabricated and witnesses were coerced. Amnesty International, the European Parliament, and dozens of public figures have called for his release or a new trial. Peltier remains in federal prison, one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the Western Hemisphere by his supporters’ reckoning.

Twenty conquistadors burst through the doors of the governor’s palace in Lima and stabbed Francisco Pizarro to death in his own dining room. On June 26, 1541, supporters of Diego Almagro the Younger, the mestizo son of Pizarro’s former partner, stormed the palace in a desperate bid to seize control of Peru. Pizarro, then approximately 65 years old, fought back with a sword, killing at least one attacker before being overwhelmed and slashed across the throat. The murder was the culmination of a civil war among the Spanish conquerors of the Inca Empire. Pizarro and Diego Almagro the Elder had been partners in the conquest of Peru, but their alliance disintegrated over the division of territory and treasure. The two men fought an open war in 1538, ending when Pizarro’s forces captured and executed Almagro the Elder after the Battle of Las Salinas. Almagro’s supporters, stripped of their encomiendas and reduced to poverty, coalesced around his teenage son. Pizarro had received warnings about the conspiracy but dismissed them, reportedly saying he was too old and too powerful to worry about a band of desperate men. The attackers, numbering about twenty, crossed Lima’s central plaza after Sunday mass, shouting "Death to the tyrant!" Most of Pizarro’s household fled at the first sounds of fighting. Only a handful of servants and his half-brother Martín de Alcántara, who was killed in the attack, stood with the aging conquistador. Almagro the Younger briefly seized power in Peru but was himself defeated and executed by royalist forces under Cristóbal Vaca de Castro within a year. The cycle of conquest, betrayal, and civil war among the conquistadors continued for another decade until the Spanish Crown imposed direct royal authority. Pizarro’s mummified remains were eventually discovered in Lima’s cathedral in 1977, identified by DNA analysis, and placed in a glass coffin where they are displayed today.