Maps of us

It depends on your perspective,whether the glass is half full or half empty. Ten years after the first draft of the human genome was announced,the jury is now out on whether that achievement has truly delivered on its promise. Indeed,tall claims were made for the project,spearheaded by American geneticist Francis Collins. To hear it in those early days of the new decade,the feeling was that the Biotech Century would make its fruits available at the very outset. Timetables were bandied about with abandon as to how long it would be before we had treatments for Alzheimers,different cancers,diabetes. Today,those treatments are still awaited.

On this anniversary,then,there has been widespread stocktaking of whether the human genome project has truly delivered on its widely publicised potential. After all,we appear to be not much nearer a disease-free future than we were then. In fact,the successes that have followed upon the sequencing of the human genome have detailed just how complex our genes are.

But did that summer of 2000 bring a false hope? You would have to be inordinately pessimistic to think so. Recall the mood that sequencing punctured. It was just about six months after fears of a meltdown on account of the Y2K bug came to naught in fact,work to deal with it gave a fillip to the Indian software industry. That was also the time when doomsday scenarios were painted about genetic buccaneers cornering human knowledge by racing their way to patents,about genetics being the new divider between those who could afford its benefits and an underclass that could not. Sequencing of the genome,with information put in the public domain,changed the mood and grounded the terms of debate. Perhaps it was inevitable then that its significance would be overstated but only in the calendar offered,not in its revolutionary potential.