This year marks a decade after the complete sequencing of the human genome, disclosed to the world at a press conference on April 14, 2003. Manuela Grazina, professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, revisits this important achievement of human knowledge, over three articles. Here's the first:
The Sequencing Project for the decoding of the Human Genome began in 1990 and on October 23, 1998, the objectives for the Human Genome Project (HGP) were published by Francis Collins and collaborators, which determined the goal for the full decoding of the human genome for 2013, the 50th anniversary of the knowledge of the double helix structure of DNA.
On June 26, 2000, the then President of the United States of America Bill Clinton, accompanied by researchers Francis Collins and Craig Venter, publicly announced the constitution of the Consortium for the Sequencing of the Human Genome, referring to the preliminary data that had already been obtained. Until now.
Great expectations were created regarding what this advance in knowledge could mean for us. A large part of the fears that existed, fortunately, were unfounded. However, it is worth emphasizing the care that must be taken in handling genetic data and the consequences relating to knowledge of certain genetic information (in Portugal, there is Law 12/2005, to be taken into account).
After the provisional data were published on February 15, 2001, in the scientific journal Nature, by the International Consortium for the Sequencing of the Human Genome, and the following day in Science, by J. Craig Venter and colleagues, the task was completed: the day April 14, 2003, a release at press conference in Bethesda, Maryland, in the United States of America.
Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project (HGP) since 1993, declared: "The Human Genome Project was a great adventure for ourselves, to understand the DNA instruction book, the heritage shared by all of Humanity." The scientific publication appeared the following year, in the Nature magazine, on October 21, 2004.
The PGH's goals were met: to identify approximately the approximately 20.000-25.000 genes in human DNA; determine the exact sequence of the approximately 3 billion base pairs that constitute it; store information in accessible databases; improve data analysis tools; not forgetting the ethical, legal and social implications arising from knowledge of the complete sequence of the Human Genome (http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml).
(Go on)
Author: Manuela Grazina
Faculty of Medicine and Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra
[email protected]
Science in the Regional Press – Ciência Viva
List of relevant publications in: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/journals/journals.shtml
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