The road is long (with many a winding turn...)

In 2001 the Sanger Institute and the Human Genome Project announced that they had both sequenced the human genome. We are on a long road to understanding the full implications of this information.

Transcript

Dr Love (Auckland University): The human genome project revealed to us information. The hype that surrounded the early interest was “Aha! Now we’ve got it, we’ve got the sequence so now we’ve got the therapy its going to be right there, and drug development – wonderful!” Really I think all that it revealed to me is what we don’t know and so in terms of understanding disease we are still on a very long road … If you read the literature even on gene therapy, its pretty much, “Well gee shucks! That didn’t play out in the way we thought it would”, and that’s all right, we went in pretty naïve. I think understanding the genome is going to take a hell of a lot of time, and it might lead to some beneficial outcomes that are short term and we are on the money, but in large part I think we are on a long road.