What is the Human Genome Project? Where does it currently stand?
The Human Genome Project (HGP) is a 15 year, multi-billion dollar government project at the National Institutes of Health. The project has completed a draft of the DNA sequence of chemical bases A,C,G and T that make up human chromosomes. The HGP has reached an important milestone but the project has more work to do, such as proofreading the draft for errors and missing information, before the DNA sequence is complete. Then, the DNA sequence will need to be interpreted, which means discovering the genes within the sequence. Here is an analogy to help explain the HGP’s progress and its remaining work: in the language of our bodies, chromosomes are the paragraphs, genes are the words, and the DNA code of A,C,G, and T’s, are the letters. So far, the HGP has discovered the order of the letters in each paragraph. However, the letters are in still a continuous stream and need to be broken apart into words. Once the words are visible, we will still need to understand the definition of each wo
