HUMAN GENOME MAP COMPLETE
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The book of genetic instructions for the human body is complete to an accuracy of 99.99%, a scientific achievement once deemed impossible, but now considered the foundation for a new era of medical advances, according to an international research team.
With the entire sequence in hand and available to scientists worldwide, experts predicted it would lead to new drugs, better forecasts of people's health and new ways to treat or prevent many of the most devastating human illnesses.
A joint statement issued on April 14, from the leaders of the six nations, including the US president, George W.Bush, said the genetic map "provides us with the fundamental platform for understanding ourselves from which revolutionary progress will be made in biomedical sciences and in the health and welfare of humankind." The other five countries involved are france, Britain, Germany, Japan and China. The group, along with a competing private effort, completed a rough draft of the genome in 2000, but that draft included thousands of faps in the long sequence of DNA base pairs. Now all but 400 of those gaps have been closed.
"After three billion years of evolution, we have before us the instructions set that carries each of us from a one celled egg through adulthood to the grave," said Robert Waterston of the International Hman Genome Sequencing Consortium. "Itis written in an arcane language and ecompasses a complexity that we are just beginning to understand."
The Genome is composed of about three billion pairs of DNA chemicals within 24 chromosomes. The genes that control the body's development, growth, functions and aging are made of specific sequences of these chemicals pairs. A small change in these sequences can be enough to cause diseases.
This number is expected to be refined with more research. Hundreds of scientists in the consortium, reprsenting 18 organisations in 6 countries, started the sequencing work in 1990.
American agencies and Universities, led by the National Human Genome Research Institute and the Department of Energy, completed the project at a cost of about $2.7 billions, some $300 millions less and two years earlierthan the original estimate.
The US did about half of the DNA sequencing, and some of the money budgeted for hte human project was spent on sequencing other organisms, such as mouse, and on associated technologies.
Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said complete sequence of the genomeis just the beginning of the genetic revolution. Researchers now will use the sequences to try to speed idenetification of genes that causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other disorders and then to develop drugs that either prevent or treat the disorders.