In the late 1980s it occurred to a bunch of biologists, many of them Americans, that it might be possible to analyse all of the 3 billion pairs of dna "letters" that contain man's genes, and thus make a map of the human genome. The tools they had were crude, but the application of enough time and money to the problem, they thought, would yield the blueprint of rnhumanity. That would be the starting point for a new sort of biology, one in which the scope of the problem was defined in the way that the scope of chemistry is defined by the periodic table.
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