Public being misled over genome project
There is a question mark over how representative information from the Human Genome Project is of humanity at large.
An Australian expert claims that people are being misled about the benefits of the Human Genome Project and that concerns about hype over the project don't go far enough.
Dr Paul Griffiths, who specialises in the philosophy of biology at Sydney University told the ABC that expressions such as 'the book of life' or 'the human blueprint' had been used to convince governments to fund the sequencing of human genes, but the outcomes of this race would be far more modest than are being claimed by many.
"This rhetoric is very saleable," he said. "But it's not the beginning of the end. It's not even the end of the beginning"
His comments follow warnings made by the chief of the publicly funded Human Genome Project at the Human Genome Meeting 2000 in Vancouver last weekend, that people should not get over excited by announcements by companies such as Celera Genomics that they had nearly completed the human genome.
"All of us need to be very careful in our language," Dr Francis Collins told reporters. "When somebody says 'done' or 'finished' or 'completed', you need to ask them what their definition is because the answers may be very interesting."
According to the BBC, Dr Collins said that Celera was only able to make its announcements because it had reduced the numbers of reviews conducted on each new piece of data. Celera itself said it still needed to process the data and survey other individuals to check the information was correct.
But Dr Griffiths warned that, even after these steps, the Human Genome Project would only deliver certain information.
"Most people think that the Human Genome Project will tell us the significance of DNA sequences - but it won't. All it will give us is a template for construction of proteins. What these proteins do is the real issue. We've barely begun to scratch the surface of such functional genomics."
He said it was not necessary for scientists to sequence the whole genome before researching the functioning of specific genes.
Diversity is normal
Dr Griffiths said a further limitation of the genome project was the diversity of the human genome.
"The notion of there being one human genome is problematic," he said. "Because such large numbers of genes are polymorphic - which means that there is more than one form of them."
"Take the genetic basis for eye colour, for example. If you have blue eyes, it just means that you have one of a number of defective genes for the protein that makes eyes brown. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just different," he said.
"There is some concern that the existence of a 'standard human genome' will lead to genes being regarded as abnormal when they're merely rare.
"A species by nature is a pool of variation. The nice thing about Darwinism is that it embraces diversity as a normal, indeed, essential part of the evolutionary process," said Dr Griffiths.
"For ecologists and evolutionists, genetic diversity is the name of the game, but for laboratory molecular biologists, variation gets in the way of experiments which rely on having identical subjects."
