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Scientists open the book of life

WASHINGTON APRIL 15. The book of genetic instructions for the human body is complete to an accuracy of 99.99 percent, a scientific achievement once deemed impossible, but now considered the foundation for a new era of medical advances, an international research team said.

With the entire sequence in hand and available to scientists worldwide, experts predicted it would lead to new drugs, better forecasts of people's health and new ways to treat or prevent many of the most devastating human illnesses.

A joint statement on Monday from the leaders of the six nations, including the U.S. President, George W. Bush, said the genetic map ``provides us with the fundamental platform for understanding ourselves from which revolutionary progress will be made in biomedical sciences and in the health and welfare of humankind.''

The other five countries involved are France, Britain, Germany, Japan and China.

The group, along with a competing private effort, completed a rough draft of the genome in 2000, but that draft included thousands of gaps in the long sequence of DNA base pairs.

Now, all but 400 of those gaps have been closed.

``After three billion years of evolution... we have before us the instructions set that carries each of us from a one-celled egg through adulthood to the grave,'' said Robert Waterston of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium.

``It is written in an arcane language and encompasses a complexity that we are just beginning to understand.''

The genome is composed of about three billion pairs of DNA chemicals within 24 chromosomes. The genes that control the body's development, growth, functions and aging are made of specific sequences of these chemical pairs.

A small change in these sequences can be enough to cause disease.

By identifying the correct and healthy sequence of base pairs, researchers hope to be able to find the disease-causing genetic flaws that could lead to treatment. Scientists are still uncertain how many genes there are in the genome, but most believe it is about 30,000.

This number is expected to be refined with more research. Hundreds of scientists in the consortium, representing 18 organisations in six countries, started the sequencing work in 1990.

American agencies and universities, led by the National Human Genome Research Institute and the Department of Energy, completed the project at a cost of about $2.7 billions, some $300 millions less and two years earlier than the original estimate.

The U.S. did about half of the DNA sequencing, and some of the money budgeted for the human project was spent on sequencing other organisms, such as the mouse, and on associated technologies.

Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said complete sequence of the genome is just the beginning of the genetic revolution. Researchers now will use the sequences to try to speed identification of genes that cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other disorders and then to develop drugs that either prevent or treat the disorders. — AP

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