The human genome project
David A. Rew, MA MB MChir FRCS
Consultant Surgeon and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Southampton University Hospitals,
Southampton SO14 0YG, UK
Associate and Information Technology Editor. The European Journal of Surgical Oncology
The human genome invites our attention. The Human Genome Project (HGP), a collaborative international project between academic institutions to read or sequence the entire genetic code, was conceived and commenced in the mid-1990s. It has received a dramatic boost under the stimulus of a competing commercial project, such that the timescale for completion of the programme has been telescoped from the middle of this decade to the next year or so. Both projects will represent a staggering intellectual and technical achievement in documenting and ordering the billions of adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine (A, C, T and G) nucleotide bases in 23 chromosomes that make up the human genetic code. The human genome is perhaps the ultimate information technology challenge in biology.
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