Following the success of the Human Genome Project in 2003, biologists began to turn their focus to the study of genetics. The world pooled together their resources to catalogue the genetics of various humans in the 1000 Genomes Project. A year after its establishment the researchers in Puerto Rico found something strange, a descendant of one of the women who were the first experimented on for birth control research had a portion of her genetic code mutated. The Japanese researchers noticed a similar mutation in two subjects, and when looking back at the date from Phase 1, the Vietnamese researchers found the same data in one of theirs. As other researchers began looking for it, they discovered less than one percent of the individuals they studied even had the sequence in their genome, with an even smaller percentage having something bonded to it.
Following the success of the 1000 Genomes Project in 2012, one of the researchers from Los Angeles teamed up with a fellow geneticist at H.E.A.R.T. Labs in Illinois to do further research into that specific genetic sequence. This led to the discovery of the actual genetic sequence known as the Powered Gene, which seems to be a specific portion of the genome that dictates if someone gains superpowers or not.