The technology could help address these needs by upgrading the fuel value of our current energy resources and by providing new means for the bioconversion of raw materials to refined products -- not to mention offering the possibility of entirely new biomass-based energy sources.
We have thus seen only the dawn of what is surely a biological revolution, and its practical and economic applications are unquestionably destined for dramatic growth. Health-related biotechnology is already a multibillion-dollar success story, and it is still far from reaching its potential; other applications are likely to beget similar successes in the coming decades. The insights, the technologies, and the infrastructure that are already emerging from the genome project, together with advances in fields such as computational and structural biology, will become our most important tools in addressing a variety of human problems and needs.
The biosciences research community is now embarked on a program whose boldness, even audacity, has prompted comparisons with such visionary efforts as the @Apollo space program and the @Manhattan Project. That life scientists should conceive such an ambitious project is not remarkable; what is surprising -- at least at first blush -- is that the project should trace its roots to the Department of Energy.
For close to a half-century, the DOE and its governmental predecessors have been charged with pursuing a deeper understanding of the potential health risks posed by energy use and by energy-production technologies -- with special interest focused on the effects of radiation on humans. Indeed, it is fair to say that most of what we know today about radiological health hazards stems from studies supported by these government agencies. Among these investigations are long-standing studies of the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as any number of experimental studies using animals, cells in culture, and nonliving systems. Much has been learned, especially about the consequences of exposure to high doses of radiation. On the other hand, many questions remain unanswered; in particular, we have much to learn about how low doses produce their insidious effects. When present merely in low but significant amounts, toxic agents such as radiation or mutagenic chemicals wreak havoc in the most subtle ways, altering the genetic instructions in our cells only slightly. The consequences can be heritable mutations too slight to produce discernible effects in a generation or two but, in their persistence and irreversibility, deeply troublesome nonetheless.
Until recently, science offered little hope for detecting these tiny changes to the DNA that encodes our genetic program until they were well entrenched in the code. Needed was a tool that could detect a change in one base pair among, perhaps, as many as a hundred million. Then, in 1984, at a meeting convened jointly by the DOE and the International Commission for Protection Against Environmental Mutagens and Carcinogens, the question was first seriously asked: Can we, and should we, sequence the human genome? That is, can we develop the technology to obtain a word-by-word copy of the entire genetic script for an "average" human being, and thus to establish a benchmark for detecting the elusive mutagenic effects of radiation and cancer-causing toxins? Answering such a question was not simple. Workshops were convened in 1985 and 1986; the issue was studied by a DOE advisory group, by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and by the National Academy of Sciences; and the matter was debated publicly and privately among biologists themselves. In the end, however, a consensus emerged that we should make a start.
Adding impetus to the DOE's earliest interest in the human genome was the Department's stewardship of the national laboratories, with their demonstrated ability to conduct large multidisciplinary projects -- just the sort of effort that would be needed to develop and implement the technological knowhow needed for the Human Genome Project. Biological research programs already in place at the national labs benefited from the contributions of engineers, physicists, chemists, computer scientists, and mathematicians, working together in multi-disciplinary teams. Thus, with the infrastructure in place and with a particular interest in the ultimate results, the Department of Energy, in 1986, was the first federal agency to announce and to fund an initiative designed to pursue a detailed understanding of the human genome.
Of course, interest was not restricted to the DOE. Workshops had also been sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the @Howard @Hughes Medical Institute. In the fall of 1988, the DOE and the NIH signed a memorandum of understanding that laid the foundation for a concerted interagency effort. The basis for this community-wide excitement is not hard to comprehend. The first impulse behind the DOE's commitment was only one of many reasons for coveting a deeper insight into the human genetic script. Defective genes directly account for an estimated 4000 hereditary human diseases -- maladies such as @Huntington disease and cystic fibrosis. In some such cases, a single misplaced letter among three billion can have lethal consequences. One of the most widespread of these afflictions is sickle cell anemia, in which a single base code is altered. For most of us, though, even greater interest focuses on the far more common ailments in which altered genes influence but do not prescribe. Heart disease, many cancers, and some psychiatric disorders, for example, can emerge from complicated interplays of environmental factors and genetic misinformation.
