genetic mapping; DNA; applied research; molecular genetics T Human Genome Project is an international research project whose primary mission is to decipher the chemical sequence of the complete human genetic material (i.e., the entire genome), identify all 50,000 to 100,000 genes contained within the genome, and provide research tools to analyze all this genetic information. This ambitious proj...

In January, Harold Varmus will begin the next stage in an unusual career. He’s gone from English literature to medicine to bench science to Washington science bureaucrat, and now he becomes the well-paid (some would say extremely well-paid) president of a private, not-for-profit treatment and research facility, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He’s succeeded in everything...

Madame Chairman and members of the Committee, we are pleased to appear before you today to discuss our programs at the National Institutes of Health. Revolutionary advances in our understanding of human genetics have opened a window on the chemical quirks in our genes that make us susceptible to many devastating diseases including cancer. Over the past two decades, using the tools of recombinan...

In the present chapter it is carried out an evaluation of the motivations which lead to the launching and the subsequent development of the Human Genome Project. In this respect, then ideological, biosanitary and economic factors are considered. Although the importance of the sanitary applications is admitted, both in then diagnostic aspect and, the long term, in the therapeutic one, it is argu...