The lasting influence of the Human Genome Project
Before 1990, it sounded like science fiction. Making a map of the nucleotides in a human genome? The only thing that sounded more impossible than the goal was its applications, whether in treating illnesses like breast cancer and cystic fibrosis or studying the theory of evolution. Yet in 1990, the Human Genome Project became a reality, and ten years later a working draft was released. A “complete” map was released in 2003, but there have been several additions to the research since then.The organization behind the project was the National Human Genome Research Institute (originally the National Center for Human Genome Research), a division of the National Institutes of Health. Originally estimated at 3-billion dollars and founded in conjunction by the NIH and the United States Department of Energy, the project was “biotech” in the truest sense of the word. By the way, the actual cost is now somewhere nearer 10 billion.When the researchers at the HGP first started tackling the genome, they came up with the shortcut of only looking at the sites where variant DNA units were common. Later, the group divided the genome into pieces roughly 150,000 base pairs in length (for comparison, there were approximately 3.3 billion base pairs in the genome) and used a technique known as “shotgun sequencing” to map them.Today, the gene is considered about 92.3 complete, but we don’t currently have the technology to sequence the remaining centromeres and telomeres. The latter are expected to have a profound effect on aging. You can access all currently-sequenced nucleotides at the GenBank, run by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.