ABSTRACT
An awesome analysis, undreamed of less than 15 years ago, revealed the entire genetic blueprint of a human being and, in doing so, provides an entirely unexpected answer to the ancient dictum ‘Man – know thyself’. The vast majority of geneticists fought shy of human genetics for most of this century for very good reasons – humans were too complex, produced too few progeny, took too long to reproduce and they were particularly amenable to controlled breeding programmes Geneticists much preferred to work with other organisms. While the geneticists working with organisms other than humans were busy identifying thousands of proteins, cloning and sequencing the genes, encoding them and entering them onto databases, human geneticists were struggling with every gene they tried to identify. The human genome sequence will provide information to be used by scientists for many decades to come as they attempt to solve the mysteries of how genes affect us in health and in disease.
