Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...impossible to overstate the significance of this achievement. Armed with the genetic code, scientists can now start teasing out the secrets of human health and disease at the molecular level--secrets that will lead at the very least to a revolution in diagnosing and treating everything from Alzheimer's to heart disease to cancer, and more. In a matter of decades, the world of medicine will be utterly transformed, and history books will mark this week as the ceremonial start of the genomic...
...that made its sequencing rate, already the fastest around, even faster. In addition, Venter claims that by the end of the year, he'll have sequenced the genome of the mouse--whose 2.3 billion letters contain enough similarities to ours to make it vitally important to scientists tracking down human gene function...
...bank into a yacht- and sports car-owning multimillionaire who threw Gatsby-like parties (last year's income: $560,000, not counting options on Celera stock that were worth, at last week's closing price of $125.25, nearly $351 million). And by declaring his intention to sequence the entire human genome in only a fraction of the time (three years) and at a much lower cost ($200 million) than government-sponsored scientists had originally said it would take (15 years and $3 billion), he made his colleagues look like fools. (At the photo session last Thursday for TIME's cover...
...genetic alphabet is just a first step. Still ahead for Celera as well as its competitors: the much more complicated task of telling what those letters mean, what they do and what can be done if the messages they spell out are in error--a prime cause of human disease and suffering (see following story...
Within a year, Venter had decoded 100,000 letters (the human genome has some 3.1 billion, spelling out some 50,000 different genes, at the best guess). They were hieroglyphics to him, but not, he knew, to living cells, which recognize active genes and spin off single strands of RNA that mirror the DNA's coding. So Venter collected the new RNA, inserting it into bacterial cells and letting them clone junk-free complementary DNA, or cDNA, matching the original genes. His automatic sequencer could then read the letters of these genetic instructions...