AS THE two parallel efforts to sequence the human genome enter their final
stages, the geneticists who gathered in Vancouver for last week’s meeting of the
Human Genome Organisation are already looking ahead. Many think the key to
finding the meaningful words in the three-billion-letter long sentence of our
DNA is sequencing the genome of the humble lab mouse. “That will be the Rosetta
Stone in terms of interpreting the human genome,” says Steven Jones of the
Genome Sequence Centre in Vancouver.
The company Celera Genomics, headed by Craig Venter, which is already setting
the pace in unravelling the human…
