Scientists from the Human Genome Project yesterday described the mapping of the human genetic code as "a gift to the world" that could improve the ability to detect disease and encourage the development of new medicines.
At the London launch of research to decipher the genetic code, carried out by the public sector-funded Human Genome Project, Sir John Sulston, former director of the Sanger Centre, described the drawing of the human gene map as "a remarkable, iconic event in the era of molecular biology". "It is remarkable that a living organism has got so smart and has made such clever machines that it can think about what it is doing, that it has actually read out the code, the instructions, to make itself.
"It's the sort of thing that causes philosophers to disappear up their navels if they think too hard about it. It really is a superficial paradox . . . but it's true. We are understanding how we work," he said. Sir John argued that focusing on the smaller than predicted number of human genes as a means of informing the nature/nurture debate was unhelpful.
He said the discovery that there were between 30,000 and 40,000 genes in the human genome, rather than 100,000 as previously estimated, did not inform the nature/nurture argument, "because we don't understand how genes work. Genetic diversity is absolutely huge, without individual diversity built upon that".
Advances in medical science could follow from the identification of the genes responsible for non-inherited diseases, and scientists could eventually learn to predict the likelihood of someone developing a genetic disorder. Medicine could then tailor specific drugs for patients and there could be a "gradual increase" in the range of treatments for genetic disorders in the next few decades.
The work of two competing teams of scientists in sequencing the human genome has served to confirm and mutually vindicate each other's historic work in creating a biological equivalent of chemistry's periodic table, a press conference in Washington was told by the leader of an international group of researchers.
Senator Pete Domenici, genome research's foremost political supporter, said their work was "the greatest wellness project in mankind's history". Others spoke of the research representing "the book of life".
The leader of the public sector-based International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, Dr Francis Collins, said there were only differences of emphasis between the teams, and no major areas "where they say green and we say blue", in the analysis announced jointly yesterday by his team and Celera Genomics into their respective sequences.
Celera's president, Dr Craig Venter, agreed, saying they could now go forward "without arguing on the fundamentals".
The sense of scientific history in the making at the overflow press conference in the Capitol Hilton was emphasised by the warm welcome for Dr James Watson, who with Crick had 48 years ago first described the double helix shape of DNA for Nature magazine.
Dr Collins recalled the words the two men had written to the magazine, explaining with extraordinary understatement that their theories "had features of considerable biological interest". Nature shared the honours yesterday with its rival Science, in each publishing simultaneously the conclusions of the rival teams.
Both teams said they believed yesterday's announcements heralded, in Dr Ventner's words, "a new dawn for therapeutics". Dr Collins said free access to the international consortium's discoveries had already resulted in new drugs being tested. He hoped to see their work bearing fruit within five to seven years in areas like diabetes, heart disease and major mental disorders. Major advances had been made in schizophrenia.
But Dr Venter insisted that the ability to link gene defects to diseases only amounted to establishing probabilities of susceptibility. Their predictive power should not be exaggerated, and he and Dr Collins deplored attempts by companies to test workers secretly and discriminate against them on the basis of their genetic profiles.
Dr Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute for Genome Research, and part of the international consortium, said the fact that any two people were 99.9 per cent genetically identical still left room for considerable genetic variation. One-tenth of 1 per cent of human genes represented three million genes, he said, plenty to account for hereditary differences.
The Human Genome Project can be viewed at www.wellcome.ac.uk