The Human Genome at Ten Years Old 26 Jun 2010
On 26th June 2000, President Clinton, PM Tony Blair, Francis Collins and Craig Venter held a press conference to announce the first draft of the Human Genome. Ten years on, many commentators are reviewing the project. What were its aims, have they been achieved? Has biology changed substantially and has medicine also benefited? In the Economist
Genome at Ten special, Geoffrey Carr notes that:
..."the race Dr Venter and Dr Collins had been engaged in was a race not to the finish but to the starting line. Moreover, compared with the sprint they had been running in the closing years of the 1990s, the new race marked by that starting line was a marathon."
Speaking to
The Times' Mark Henderson and on BBC's
Today programme, Francis Collins provides his thoughts on what has been achieved and where future developments in medicine will first be seen. He notes that Pharmacogenomics is likely to be an area in which routine benefits might be felt for larger populations, and that cancer treatment will be another area of early benefit:
“Cancer is I think going to be right out in front here. And I think we would all expect that within the next decade every cancer identified, at least in countries that have the resources, a full enumeration of what is going wrong in that tumour, and then an ability to match that up with the available therapeutics so you are doing the best possible job of throwing smart bombs, instead of the carpet bombing of traditional chemotherapy.”
Read/hear more about the HGP anniversary here:
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Nature's Ten Years On special edition
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New York Times highlights the challenges still ahead for the field of genomics
