PARIS (AFP) - Scientists announced they had completed a working draft of the instructions to make a human being, launching an era of dazzling medical rewards and somber moral concerns.
An international group of public-sector scientists said it had unraveled 97 percent of the human genetic code, and 85 percent of the data had been assembled in the right sequence.
Hailing what it called a landmark in knowledge, the consortium, the Human Genome Project (HGP) said it had "assembled a working draft of the human genome - the genetic blueprint for a human being."
HGP participants in Japan, Britain and France made announcements. Other countries participating are the United States, which has shouldered the lion's share of the work and $300-million cost, as well as Germany and China.
An American firm, Celera Genomics, has raced with the HGP to the finishing line. It was scheduled to make a joint announcement in Washington with the public-sector group later Monday. "The decoding of the human genome, the deciphering of the book of life, is a milestone in science," said French Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg.
Super-computers in state-of-the-art laboratories have been running day and night seven days a week to decipher the genome's estimated 3.2 billion "bases." These are the rungs that connect the double-helix ladder of DNA - a lengthy molecule of phosphate and sugar that lies coiled in each of 23 pairs of chromosomes, at the core of each of the body's cells. Along each strand lie the genes - the complex tools which control the proteins that make up the body, repair damage or, conversely, inflict ill-health - as well as long segments of so-called "junk" DNA that has no known use.
By figuring out how genes work, biomedical researchers hope to be able to thwart or reverse innumerable diseases, ranging from Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy and dwarfism to types of cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis, asthma and heart disease. Genetic knowledge will also be a powerful diagnostic tool, enabling doctors to advise patients that they have inherited a condition that could be triggered or alleviated by their lifestyle, and whether they are allergic to certain drugs.
But genetic medicine is still in its earliest infancy. Wonder drugs lie many years down the road, and researchers stress that the first task is to complete the rough draft with 99.9-percent accuracy.
Work has been progressing so fast that this goal, previously sketched for 2003, will be reached "considerably ahead of that schedule," the HGP said. It added that scientists had harvested a "bumper crop" of human genetic variations - different permutations of genetic sequences that should cast light on how diseases develop and why some people are more prone to them than others. A goal of discovering 100,000 of these variations had been set for 2003, but the tally will already be more than a million by the end of this year.
Monday's announcement was a trumpeting flourish to what many analysts believe will be the century of biotechnology, just as the 20th century was dominated by physics. But it also gave a hint of the many ethical and legal issues ahead.
France's Schwartzenberg made a veiled criticism of Celera, saying, "thanks to public research, carried out with public money, the basic data of the human genetic sequence will be accessible to all."
The human genome "is humanity's common legacy. Knowledge of it cannot be expropriated by a few, but must belong to everyone... genetic knowledge cannot be confiscated," he said. Celera has filed thousands of patents over fragments of genetic code that it has uncovered in the race against the HGP.
The Rockville, Maryland firm says it only filed applications as a precautionary step and notes that it is merely following the approach of many other biotech firms that are also deciphering genetic data. It says it will sell applications and research deriving from the data, as compared with the raw data itself, to other researchers and the pharmaceutical business.
Of the many moral questions likely to surface in the coming years, the principal worry is whether knowledge of genes will be abused, to create "super beings" manipulated to be highly intelligent or athletically gifted.
Another fear is whether medical benefits will flow to just a small, wealthy elite, focusing on cosmetic problems such as baldness and fat rather than on the health problems of the world's majority.
Socially, the big question is whether employers, lenders or insurance companies should have access to our genetic profile. For there is the risk that people will suffer discrimination for the genetic lot they have drawn in life
