The broken promises of the Human Genome Project

Scientists begin with a fixed conclusion, hyperbolize the benefits of reaching it, and then spend large amounts of private and public money to reach it only to discover their original promises were impossible. The Human Genome Project began not with a question, but an answer that had to be substantiated in reverse.

More than two decades later there is little to show, though an intrepid beauty-product company has used genomics to create a better shampoo. In the end, it was discovered that only 2 percent of the genes in the human genome are responsible for coding proteins, thought to be central to life, while the other 98 percent were written off as “junk.”