June 26th 2010 was the 10th Anniversary of the announcement in portentous tones, by the then US President Bill Clinton at the White House in Washington, that the Human Genome had been sequenced. The Anniversary was an opportunity for the scientific press and the media to reflect on whether the hype that accompanied the announcement was justified [1]. Hardly a day goes by without reports of the identification of an association of a genetic variant to some common disease such as diabetes, cardiovascular or Alzheimer's disease. The field is full of concepts such as the Dollars 1000 genome, whole genome sequencing, single gene chips to survey gene expression for all the 20 000 or so human genes, screens for proteins and metabolites. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Craig Venter, the leader of the private sequencing consortium, are just two of the increasing number of people who have had their DNA sequenced. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has had his DNA sequence published by Nature [2]. Yet many of the hoped for benefits in terms of new drugs have not arrived, and there is a growing realism that the real development of the field has only just begun [3].
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