The publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP) and the private US company Celera Genomics on June 26 jointly announced in Washington DC the completion of a “working draft” of the more than 3 billion chemical letters of the human genome, the so-called human genetic blueprint.
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In fact, only 90 per cent of the genetic material had been sequenced, and the scientists expected to complete the sequence in 2003. The HGP and Celera had been bitter rivals in the race to decode the genome, with some scientists strongly criticising Celera’s president, Craig Venter, for his apparent attempt to privatise basic scientific data by taking out patents on genetic information. It was thought by analysts that political pressure had brought the two rivals together for the announcement. US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair were linked in a televised ceremony to celebrate the scientific breakthrough [for background see pp. 43603; 43548; 43496].
It was widely thought that the announcement marked a great scientific achievement that would, in time, transform the understanding and treatment of many diseases. More inflated claims for “decoding the book of life” were also made by some commentators, with Mike Dexter, director of the Wellcome Trust, the UK charity which funded a third of the project, saying that the mapping of the genome had possibly longer-lasting significance than the invention of the wheel. Many scientific analysts cautioned, however, that the “working draft” merely represented the beginning of a much longer and more expensive project of research to identify the individual genes and their functions.
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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