Human Genome Project:Road Map for Science and Medicine

▪ 2001

Introduction

by Judith L. Fridovich-Keil

      Certain to rank among the all-time landmarks of human technical achievement, the completion of a rough draft of the sequence of the human nuclear genome was announced in June 2000. Its significance and ramifications for science and society are both broad and profound, and, as with any empowering technical advance, the challenge that now faces humanity, both as individuals and as a global community, is to determine how to use that power wisely.

Mendel's Legacy

      Human genetics is but one small piece of the much larger field of classical and molecular genetics, which often is said to have begun with the work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s. Mendel studied the garden pea, exploring in quantitative terms the transmission of sharply defined traits such as plant height, seed colour, and seed texture from one generation to the next. Although Mendel knew nothing about the modern concepts of genes and chromosomes, he deduced from observations that each parent plant carries a pair of determining units for each trait studied, that one trait unit can sometimes dominate the other, and that the units are transmitted as some kind of physical entities from parent to offspring during reproduction. (The pairs of trait units are now recognized to be corresponding genes on paired chromosomes.) The major conclusion of Mendel's studies represented a dramatic break with the mainstream thought of the time and are often summarized as Mendel's laws. His first law is that the paired trait units separate, or segregate, during the formation of gametes (sex cells)—that is, an offspring inherits from a parent either one trait unit or the other, but not both. The second law, which Mendel derived from experiments in which he studied the simultaneous inheritance of different traits, is that the units for the traits assort independently—that is, the unit an offspring inherits for one trait is independent of the unit it inherits for another trait.

      It is now recognized that Mendel's laws have many exceptions and that, in fact, they represent only a subset of the whole process of genetic inheritance. Nevertheless, in both peas and humans, they still explain the pattern and frequency of transmission for a large number of genetic traits, including many common human diseases such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia. Subsequent work in the 1900s by numerous researchers, using model organisms ranging from fruit flies to corn to viruses that infect bacteria, provided a more comprehensive view of the complexities of genetic transmission. In addition, their studies took the first steps toward a molecular explanation of genetic observations, including the discovery that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA)—long strands built of molecular subunits called nucleotides chained end to end—constitute the genetic material in all living things. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick proposed a structure for DNA—a double helix of intertwined nucleotide strands. This event marks what many consider the birth of modern molecular genetics.

Genes and Genomes

      In simplified terms, a single gene in a given organism is the set of instructions for making a molecular product. The product may be one of the many macromolecules necessary for the development and life of that organism or one of the components necessary for the maintenance, expression, and propagation of the instruction set itself. The gene uses a chemical code in which the instructions are written, and those instructions are heritable—they can be passed from one generation to the next, which thereby explains Mendel's observations. In physical terms, a gene is a discrete stretch of nucleotides within a DNA or RNA molecule. Each nucleotide contains a chemical “base”—guanine, adenine, thymine, or cytosine (represented as G, A, T, and C, respectively) for the DNA genes of human beings and other organisms. It is the specific sequence of these bases that defines the information contained in the gene and that is ultimately translated into a final product, most often a protein. The protein may have a structural role, or it may serve as a catalyst to promote the formation of other macromolecules, including carbohydrates and lipids. Some functional products of genes are themselves nucleic acids, demonstrating the power and versatility of these molecules.

      The genome is the entire coded genetic blueprint of an organism, the full set of genetic instructions for making all of the molecules that constitute it. In the case of humans, the genome is composed of more than three billion pairs of bases, which have been copied and passed on letter by letter with gradual modification and expansion for more than a billion years since life began. The vast majority of the human genome exists as enormously long DNA molecules that reside in the form of 23 pairs of elaborately packaged chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell. The goal of the current genome effort has been the sequencing of the bases in this nuclear portion of the genome and a physical mapping of their location on the chromosomes. Another tiny, but nonetheless essential, chromosome exists outside the nucleus, in cellular organelles called mitochondria. The sequence of the human mitochondrial chromosome has already been described.

Race to the Finish

      By the 1980s the base sequence of a large number of genes had been determined through many individual contributions, providing much crucial information to biology and medicine. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the human genome was still unexplored territory. Scientists, politicians, ethicists, and others debated, hotly at times, the merits, risks, and relative costs of sequencing the entire human genome in one concerted undertaking. Was it a feasible goal? Was it worth the billions of public dollars that it would inevitably take away from traditional biomedical research? Despite the controversy, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) pushed forward with an ambitious plan and in 1990 launched what became known as the Human Genome Project. Fortunately, the effort was soon joined by scientists from around the globe. Moreover, a series of technical leaps, both in the biochemical sequencing process itself and in the computer hardware and software used to track and analyze the constituent sequences, enabled such rapid progress that the project eventually drew ahead of schedule.

      Technological advance, however, was only one of the forces spurring the pace of discovery. In 1998 a private-sector enterprise, Celera Genomics, headed by former NIH scientist J. Craig Venter, entered the race in the final lap, challenging the publicly funded Human Genome Project, led by geneticist Francis Collins. (See Biographies (Collins, Francis ).) At the heart of the competition was the issue of money, especially control over potential patents on the genome sequence, considered by most a pharmaceutical treasure trove. Although the legal and marketplace aspects remained unclear, in the 11th hour the once bitter rivals pulled a surprise move and joined forces to some extent, speeding completion of the rough draft sequence, which represented the first stage of the project.

The Tasks Ahead

      It is tempting to think that once the full sequence, or code, of an organism's genome is known, scientists will immediately understand all the inner workings of that organism. The reality is that, although scientists may be empowered, they are not yet enabled. They must still locate all the functional genes in the genome, determine what products they make, and learn what those products do. Their situation is in many ways similar to having all of the words of a foreign language written in a list but without spaces, punctuation, or definitions. Being able to see the letters—or even the words—is only the beginning. Fundamentally, the job of research must now shift from one of gathering data to one of understanding it.

      It is also important to recognize that the term the human genome is somewhat misleading, because there is no single genome sequence that defines everyone. No two humans other than identical twins share identical genomes. For the rest, although the genomes are more than 99% identical, each is unique. The recently published human genome sequence that has been posted on the Internet as a public database, , is but one “flavour” of normal. The DNA that was sequenced in the project was derived from real people, and real people, even though they are healthy, carry hidden in their genomes not only many neutral polymorphisms, or base sequence variations, but also potentially serious recessive mutations masked by dominant counterparts. Thus, it is likely that some of the sequences currently published as “normal” are, in fact, not. Clearly, a comparison of sequences derived from a spectrum of healthy individuals will be needed to determine what should be included in the normal range.

Implications for Biomedicine

      Public availability of the complete human genome represents a defining moment for both biomedical research and medical practice. The genome database will speed identification of genes implicated in a variety of genetic diseases and thus enable more objective and accurate diagnosis, in some cases even before the onset of clinical symptoms.

      With regard to prognosis, as more disease-related genes are identified and their mutations pinpointed in the genomes of affected individuals, the information can be combined with information about corresponding clinical outcomes to find correlations between specific gene sequences and outcomes. Such correlations for a given disorder can help guide research into the underlying mechanisms and predict the future severity of symptoms in a given patient. For newly diagnosed individuals and their families, this information can be invaluable in coping with the present symptoms and in planning for the future.

      Finally, knowledge of the normal functions of genes associated with disease and the mutations that impair those functions can enable a more rational approach to treatment. Although gene therapy is seen as the ultimate application of human genome research to the treatment of many genetic disorders ranging from cystic fibrosis to cancer, genetic knowledge of a disease can benefit even conventional, symptomatic therapies—for example, by helping to define the disease state in a given individual as benign or aggressive.

Judith L. Fridovich-Keil is an associate professor in the department of genetics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Ga.

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