As the architect, scientific leader and very public face of deCODE, one of Stefansson's fundamental contributions has been to demonstrate that genomics can be done at national scale, and to provide a realized example of how to do it. By the time Human Genome Project and Celera published their draft sequences of the human genome in 2001, his vision for population genetics had already taken shape and was yielding early discoveries of sequence variation linked to disease, human evolution and population history. In 2002, deCODE used its capabilities in Iceland to publish a genetic map of the genome that was used to complete the final assembly of the reference human genome sequence. By mid-decade, even former critics acknowledged that what Stefansson was building in Iceland through fully consented individual participation and datamining was indeed an important example to prospective genome projects in the UK, US, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and elsewhere, and to the foundation of new institutions like the Broad Institute.