When President Bill Clinton announced in 2000 that Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute had succeeded in mapping the human genome, he solemnly declared that the discovery would “revolutionize” the treatment of virtually all human disease.
The expectation was that this single reference map of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA — the human genetic code — would quickly unlock the secrets of Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer and other scourges of human health.
Thirteen years after Clinton’s forecast, even Venter acknowledges that mapping the human genome has had little clinical impact. “Yes, there’s been progress, but we all would have hoped it would have been more rapid,” he said in an interview in his offices.
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