On June 26, 2000, Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, presented at the White House the first draft of the “genetic book of human life”: the human genome. It was the result of a decade of work by some 3,000 scientists from 20 institutes in six countries around the world, and it promised “a revolution in the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, diseases.”
Ten years after the sequencing of the human genome, the journal Nature has consulted almost 1,200 scientists. And although everything indicates that there is still a long way to go before the predicted “great medical revolution” is a reality, the human genome has left its mark in the field of research. 69 percent of those surveyed have confessed that the finding inspired them to dedicate themselves to science or to change the course of what they were researching . In addition, 90 percent said that the discovery of the genome had helped them carry out their own research. And nearly a third of scientists admit that they use the human genome sequence almost daily in their projects . “It’s hard for young researchers like me to imagine how biologists were previously able to work without that finding,” wrote one of the respondents.
On a personal level, the survey has also revealed how scientists are taking advantage of all the information available to study their own genomes. About 15 percent responded that they had undergone a genetic test in the medical field, and almost one in ten had used the tests available in pharmacies. Thirteen percent acknowledged that they had already sequenced and analyzed part of their own DNA, and the majority responded that if they had the opportunity to sequence the DNA of a living being, they would do so with their own, with that of their children, with the from a family member or with the DNA of your pets .
Currently, several projects are trying to complete the information that the sequencing of the “code of life” offers us, among them the Human Epigenome Project , which aims to identify environmental factors and chemical changes that can modulate our DNA.
