The Human Genome Project has a birthday present for DNA and an anniversary present for James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick. Next month, the public consortium of 16 labs in six countries will celebrate the completion of the "final draft" of the human genome. The celebration will mark the successful attainment of the original goals of the public project, according to Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. The announcement will come in the same month as the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's publication of DNA's structure.

"I remember leading a meeting in September 1998 where we mapped out the possible timetable for getting the job done," Collins recalls. "We realized that if all went well, we might just make it in 2003 instead of 2005. We began to think, 'Wouldn't it be interesting if that fell in the very month of Watson and Crick's 50th anniversary?' "

Eric S. Lander, director of the Center for Genome Research at the Whitehead Institute, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the leaders of the public sequencing effort, says, "I think it's wonderful to say that only 50 years after the structure of DNA was conceived, we have essentially finished the sequence of the human genome."

Despite being declared finished, the human genome will still have some holes. "There are still parts of the human genome that we don't know how to sequence with today's technology," Lander says. "There are things like centromeres and telomeres and a few unclonable bits that we just don't know what to do with yet."

According to Lander, the finished sequence contains about 300 gaps, compared with 300,000 in the 2001 draft, and an error rate of less than one base in 10,000, possibly even less than one in 100,000. "We thought we'd be able to get a finished sequence of 95% of the genome and 5% would turn out to be unapproachable," Lander says. "It's quite clear that it's more like 1or 2% that's unapproachable. We've got much further than we had hoped."

On April 14 and 15, NIH will sponsor a scientific symposium celebrating DNA and the human genome. The first day will look back at the past 50 years and what has been learned so far from the human genome. The second day will be a "futuristic glimpse of where this is going to take us in medicine and public health and society," Collins says. "I hope that this is the kind of symposium that a lot of people will be affected by, particularly young scientists who are looking for ideas of how they want to spend their careers."

On April 25, the anniversary of Watson and Crick's landmark publication, NIH is sponsoring National DNA Day, which will focus on high school education. Approximately 1,000 scientists have signed up to be DNA Day mentors, who will visit classes to talk about what it's like to work in this field, Collins says. In addition, a videotaped interview session with Collins, Watson, high school students, and their teachers will be broadcast via satellite.

In April, NHGRI will also reveal its plans for what's next. "We are going to unveil a new, bold, audacious plan for where genomics research could now most usefully go in order to reap the benefits--particularly in the field of medicine--that were the original motivation for doing this in the first place. There will be a publication that lays out in eight to 10 pages a list of what we think are the most exciting next priorities for building on this foundation," Collins says. "It will include a broad array of ideas and projects that we hope the scientific community will embrace and start to work on with great intensity."

"Watson and Crick launched an entire field, and they did it in one page. In that sense, nothing holds a candle to the Watson and Crick paper," Lander says. "But in another sense, the Watson and Crick paper was a foundation for 50 years' worth of work. I think, in that sense, the Human Genome Project will prove the foundation for the next 50 years of work."

Chemical & Engineering News
Copyright © 2003 American Chemical Society