The field of Genetics is undergoing tumultuous change after nearly a century of standard approaches to genetic analysis. The Human Genome Project is providing tools and technologies that are changing the ways that we pursue an understanding of gene function, which is the underlying goal in modern and traditional genetics. In this paper, I overview the directions of the genome project as they relate to gene function analysis in mice and humans, and how various modern technologies are coalescing to address this in a powerful way.