Understanding the human genome

At least since Alan Turing tackled Enigma in World War II, building machines to crack codes has been the domain of computer scientists and engineers. Lately they have joined biologists in cracking humanity's most important code-the human genome, the complete set of all our genetic information. Sequencing the human genome is essentially putting in order the over 3 billion chemical units that encode the instructions on how to build and operate a human being. But those instructions are written in a language biology does not fully understand. Indeed, some have described the genome as a parts list minus information on how the parts connect or what they do. And leading scientists are quick to point out that just knowing the raw data set that makes up the genome is not an end in itself. Rather, the usefulness of the genome will emerge only after scientists have figured out how the parts go about making the machine that is the human body. This is what the biology of the new millennium is all about. It is an accelerated science based as much on bits and semiconductor chips as on microscope slides and test tubes. The in silico approach will eclipse in vitro and even in vivo, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., predicted. Scientists suspecting a genetic correlation with disease can now seek out starting points in the genes of humans and other creatures, compressing what would have been a decade or more of research into a day or two of database queries. In fact, an industry known as bioinformatics has grown up around the idea that biology will increasingly depend on sorting and manipulating huge amounts of data. Industry analysts forecast that the market for genomics information and the technology to use it will reach an annual US $2 billion by 2005.