It was hoped that the Human Genome Project, at a cost of around $3bn (£2.5bn), would yield treatments for chronic illnesses, and shed light on everything that is genetically determined about our lives.īut even as the press conferences were being held to herald the triumph of this new era of biological understanding, this instruction manual for human life had already thrown up an unexpected surprise.Īt the time, the prevailing belief was that the vast majority of the human genome would consist of instructions for making proteins, the building blocks of all living organisms that perform a bewildering range of roles within and between our cells.
When the 13-year-long effort to sequence the entire "book of life" encoded within the human genome was declared "complete" in April 2003, there were high expectations.
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