“It’s a history book, a shop manual and, most importantly, a textbook of
medicine,” says Francis Collins, head of genome research at the National
Institutes of Health near Washington DC. “But it’s written in a language we
don’t quite understand yet.”
“The sequence is only the first level of understanding of the genome,” Craig
Venter says. “The next steps are clear. We must define the complexity that
ensues when this relatively modest set of about 30,000 genes is expressed.”
As the genome has been assembled, the publicly funded Human Genome Project
and Celera have been cataloguing millions of variations…
