List of Events in NHGRI History - 2001

2001

• January 16–18, 2001 – The Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Research Programs of The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) sponsor a conference to celebrate a decade of research and consider its impact on genetic research, health and policy.
• February 2001 – The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium publishes a series of scientific papers in the February 15 issue of Nature, providing the first analysis of the human genome sequence that describes how it is organized and how it evolved. One significant discovery reveals that there are only 30,000 to 40,000 genes, not 100,000 as previously thought.
• February 2001 – National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) scientists use microarray technology to develop a gene test that differentiates hereditary from sporadic types of breast cancer. Findings are reported in the February 22 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
• March 2001 – National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and Human Genome Project (HGP)-funded scientists find a new tumor suppressor gene involved in breast, prostate and other cancers on human chromosome 7. A single post-doc, using the "working draft" sequence data, is able to pin down the gene within weeks; before, the same work took several years and the work of many scientists. Findings are reported in the April issue of Nature Genetics.
• May 2001 – The Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium (MGSC) announces it has achieved three-fold coverage of the mouse DNA sequence. The data, representing 95 percent of the mouse sequence, are publicly available and will be an important tool for discovering human genes when comparing the genomes of the mouse and human.
• May 2001 – The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and scientists at Sweden's Lund University develop a method of accurately diagnosing four complex, hard-to-distinguish childhood cancers using microarray technology and artificial neural networks (ANN). Findings are published in the June issue of Nature .
• September 2001 – The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) announces the first Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) Award, a research program that supports multi-investigator, interdisciplinary teams who develop innovative genomic approaches that address important biological and biomedical research problems and seek to change the way genomics is done and used in biomedicine.
• November 9–11, 2001 – The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) co-sponsors The Human Genome Project Conference: The Challenges and Impact of Human Genome Research for Minority Communities, along with the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority the National Education Foundation, the National Human Genome Center at Howard University, and the Family Life Center Foundation at Shiloh Baptist Church.
• December 12–14, 2001 – The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) holds the planning conference, Beyond the Beginning: The Future of Genomics at the Airlie Conference Center in Warrenton, Virginia, to develop a broad vision of the future of genomics research that will lay the foundation for a bold new plan for NHGRI.