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Milestone in human genetics to be announced Monday

gene graphic
 

June 26, 2000
Web posted at: 1:01 a.m. EDT (0501 GMT)


In this story:

Project 'will open new doors' for treatment of disease

Advances could come quickly

RELATED STORIES, SITES icon



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two groups, working independently to decode the genetic makeup of humans, will announce Monday that they have both completed "working drafts" of the project.

The breakthrough -- which comes 10 years after the project was started -- is expected to change the practice of medicine and the health care in humans, by paving the way for new drugs and medical therapies.

The Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics Inc. will hold news conferences in Washington. Announcements also are expected in London at the Sanger Center, where some of the sequencing work is being conducted.

U.S. President Bill Clinton is expected to hold a 10 a.m. news conference at the White House to announce the breakthrough.

Project 'will open new doors' for treatment of disease

The Human Genome Project is an international consortium supported mostly by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, a philanthropic organization based in London. Celera Genomics is a private company based in Rockville, Maryland.

Those looking 10 and 20 years into the future see more individualized drugs, fewer adverse drug reactions, the ability to regenerate and grow human body parts, and the technology to prevent disease and birth defects in babies even before they are born.

Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, said "it's hard to overstate the importance of reading our own instruction book and that's what the human genome project is all about."

Collins told CNN that the mapping of the human genome will open new doors in treating and researching an endless list of diseases that are currently incurable.

Advances could come quickly

"You're going to see a proliferation of discoveries about the genetic contributions to diabetes and heart disease and high blood pressure and schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis and on down the list," he said.

"Conditions that we know have genetic contributions but which have been rather difficult to nail down, this set of power tools that the genome project is producing will accelerate this discovery process rather dramatically, and we're going to see the consequences of that in the next three to five years," Collins said.

J. Craig Venter, who heads Celera, said the next step in the project is the "interpretation phase."

"That is really the fun part of the whole project because then we finally have the complete order of all the layers of genetic code and we have to discover what it all means," he said.

Venter said this is the first time in history that scientists will be able to look at the "biology of the gene, how those genes relate to each other to cause us to be alive." Venter said the advances should come quickly, adding that what once took 10 years can now be done in 15 seconds due to advanced technology and computers.

Although the public and private groups are using different methods in their human genome projects, they both have as a goal the discovery of the chemicals of the approximately 80,000 genes that make up the human body.

Each chemical is assigned a letter (A, C, G, T). Now that the sequencing is complete, scientists will look for the genetic variations in people -- variations that could be the cause of countless diseases.

Reuters contributed to this report.



RELATED STORIES:
Milestone in human genetics to be announced Monday
June 23, 2000
Have your genes sequenced online
May 24, 2000
Who owns your genes?
March 21, 2000
Implications of the Human Genome Project
March 17, 2000
U.S., Britain urge free access to human genome data
March 14, 2000
President acts to bar genetic discrimination
February 02, 2000
Clinton targets $1 billion extra for biomedical research
January 16, 2000
Scientists sequence first human chromosome
December 1, 1999
Mapping of human genome sequence to be nearly complete by 2000
June 11, 1999
Voices of the millennium: Genetics
May 28, 1999

RELATED SITES:
National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)
  • The Human Genome Project
  • The Human Genome Project: From Maps to Medicine
Human Genome Sequencing
The Human Genome Organisation (HUGO)
CDC - Office of Genetics
Department of Energy-Life Sciences Division
Celera Genome Research
  •  Genomics Education
Cooperative Human Linkage Center
The Insitute for Genomic Research
Los Alamos National Laboratory: Center for Human Genome Studies
Stanford Human Genome Center
Advanced Center for Genome Technology, University of Oklahoma
University of Utah: Human Genetics Department
University of Washinton Genome Center
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT
Genethon Genome Research (France)
Genome Sequence Centre (Canada)
Sanger Centre (U.K.)
Centre for Human Genome Research (Denmark)


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