Image via Wikipedia

On june26 2000 ,Francis Collins ,head of the Human  Genome Project ,and Craig Venter ,head of Celera Genomics ,jointly announced that they had completed the reading of a “rough draft” of the human genome-the complete set of human DNA .This was the beginning of a whole new way of understanding human biology.

Whatever we discover from the genome about how pour bodies work, it will be infinitely than everything we knew before.

It was also the end to a great detective story. In 1980 Gregory Mendel made the unexpected discovery that inheritance comes in tiny particles called genes .In 1953, James Watson And Francis Crick made the even more unexpected discovery that those particles are digital messages written along strands  of DNA in a four-letter chemical code .In 1961,Marshall Nirenberg and Johann Marthael cracked the first “word” in that code, revealing how DNA instructs the cell to build proteins .

It was then inevitable that one day we would read all the genetic messages that a human body inherits.

Of course, the genome announcement was just a beginning, for the document that was produced-as long as 900 bibles-was almost entirely mysterious.

Whoever makes sense of large parts of it will become famous .We stand on the shore of a continent of a new knowledge. But most people simply hoped it would help cure cancer and spectaculated about customized medicine, with drugs designed for the individual, not the population. Or they worried that it would leads to designer babies for the rich and feared that medical insurance might not be given to people known to have high medical risks.

Biology,Inheritance,science,ADN, Francis Collins,Human  Genome Project Craig Venter,Celera Genomics,Gregory Mendel ,James Watson ,Francis Crick ,Johann Marthael ,Marshall Nirenberg,discoveries,society,learning.