The Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project is a molecular genetics project that began in the 1990s and was projected to take fifteen years to complete. However, because of technological advances the progress of the project was advanced and the project finished in 2003, taking only thirteen years. The project was started by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health in an effort to reach six set goals. These goals included:
- identifying 20,000 to 25,000 genes in human DNA (although initial estimates were approximately 100,000 genes),
- determining sequences of chemical base pairs in human DNA,
- storing all found information into databases,
- improving the tools used for data analysis,
- transferring technologies to private sectors, and
- addressing the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the projects.
The project was worked on by eighteen different countries including the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The collaborative effort resulted in the discovery of the many benefits of molecular genetics. Discoveries such as molecular medicine, new energy sources and environmental applications, DNA forensics, and livestock breeding, are only a few of the benefits that molecular genetics can provide.
Read more about this topic: Molecular Genetics
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or project:
“Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can’t claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Although I mean it, and project the meaning
As hard as I can into its brushed-metal surface,
It cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick up
Where I leave off.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)