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Certain to rank among
the all-time landmarks of human technical achievement, the completion
of a rough draft of the sequence of the human nuclear genome was
announced in June 2000. Its significance and ramifications for
science and society are both broad and profound, and, as with
any empowering technical advance, the challenge that now faces
humanity, both as individuals and as a global community, is to
determine how to use that power wisely.
By the 1980s
the base sequence of a large number of genes had been determined
through many individual contributions, providing much crucial
information to biology and medicine. Nevertheless, the vast majority
of the human genome was still unexplored territory. Scientists,
politicians, ethicists, and others debated, hotly at times, the
merits, risks, and relative costs of sequencing the entire human
genome in one concerted undertaking. Was it a feasible goal? 
Was
it worth the billions of public dollars that it would inevitably
take away from traditional biomedical research? Despite the controversy,
the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) pushed forward with an ambitious plan and in 1990 launched
what became known as the Human Genome Project. Fortunately, the
effort was soon joined by scientists from around the globe.
Moreover,
a series of technical leaps, both in the biochemical sequencing
process itself and in the computer hardware and software used
to track and analyze the constituent sequences, enabled such rapid
progress that the project eventually drew ahead of schedule.
Lee
M. Silver
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