ABSTRACT
Governments, universities, and private industries have poured enormous amounts of money into the Human Genome Project, a program aimed at describing the sequence of nucleotides in our DNA. Since genes are made up of nucleotides, the idea is that once we know the overall sequence, we will be well on our way to knowing where the genes are. Once we know where the genes are, we can determine what they do. Once we know what they do, we can get rid of the bad ones and enhance the good ones. The problem is that the developmental process from fertilized egg, through embryo, fetus, childhood, adolescence, to eventual adulthood is influenced by a multitude of factors that go well beyond the initial schematic diagram, the genes.
