You could very properly be forgiven for pondering that the flip of the millennium was a golden age for the life sciences. After the halcyon days of the Fifties and ’60s when the development of DNA, the true nature of genes and the genetic code itself have been discovered, the Human Genome Enterprise, launched in 1990 and culminating with a preliminary announcement of your full genome sequence in 2000, appeared like – and was launched as – a comparably dramatic leap forward in our understanding of the premise of life itself. As Bill Clinton put it when the draft sequence was unveiled: ‘Instantly we’re finding out the language by means of which God created life.’ Portentous stuff.The genome sequence reveals the order by means of which the chemical developing blocks (of which there are 4 distinct varieties) that make up our DNA are organized alongside the molecule’s double-helical strands. Our genomes each have spherical 3 billion of these ‘letters’; finding out all of them is an unbelievable downside, nevertheless the Human Genome Enterprise (HGP) transformed genome sequencing inside the world of some a very long time from a extremely sluggish and dear course of into one factor you’ll get achieved by mail order for the value of a meal for two. Since that first sequence was unveiled in 2000, tons of of a whole bunch of human genomes have now been decoded, giving an indication of the person-to-person variation in sequence. This data has provided a big helpful useful resource for biomedicine, enabling us, as an illustration, to determine which components of the genome correlate with which illnesses and traits. And all that funding in gene-sequencing experience was better than justified merely by its use for studying and monitoring the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nonetheless, as with the Apollo Moon landings – with which the HGP has been routinely in distinction – the a very long time that adopted the preliminary triumph have appeared one factor of an anticlimax. For all its wise value, sequencing in itself provides little advance in understanding how the genome – or life itself – works. As a result of the veteran molecular biologist Sydney Brenner wrote in 2010, the comparability with the Apollo programme appears to be ‘truly proper’:
on account of sending an individual to the moon is simple; it’s getting him once more that is powerful and dear. Instantly the human genome sequence is, so to speak, stranded on a metaphorical moon and it is our course of to convey it once more to Earth