Human Genome project

Human Genome project. Launched as a small “initiative” at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 1985, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was a political response to the needs of the American biotechnology industry, an effort to find a post–Cold War mission for the DOE's system of national laboratories, and a dramatic manifestation of molecular biology's rising scientific power. After early debates about the feasibility and desirability of a “crash program” to map the human genome—all genetic material in the twenty‐four human chromosomes—Congress in 1986 approved public funding through both the DOE and the National Institutes of Health. With a projected completion date of 2005, the database on this average human male, an amalgam of thousands of individual genomes, was expected to serve as a medical and scientific resource analogous to the nineteenth‐century geological maps of the American West.

HGP proved extremely controversial. Its scientific strategies, funding, relationship to the biotechnology industry, impact on young scientists, patenting issues, and long‐term social and ethical implications all generated significant public debate. Members of Congress worried about the possible misuse of genetic information produced by the project, and critics characterized the project as a new form of colonial exploitation of resources—that is, of Third World blood and DNA.

The potential ethical ramifications led to congressional support for a novel funding arrangement: beginning in 1989, HGP appropriations include a funding set aside of 5 percent for scholarly studies of the ethical and social implications of the scientific work itself. While memorable for its scientific impact, the project was thus also noteworthy as an experiment, however flawed, in socially responsible science. The Human Genome Project produced many new genetic discoveries and remarkable insights into the complexities and contrarieties of genomic structure. Despite the safeguards, however, it continued to provoke widespread fears of a “new eugenics” facilitated by high‐tech gene mapping and predictive diagnostics.

At a White House Conference in June 2000, officials of the National Human Genome Research Institute and of the Celera Genomics Corporation, a private firm also working on mapping the human genome, made a simultaneous announcement that a “working draft” of the DNA sequence of the human genome had been completed.
See also Bioethics; Biological Sciences; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Energy); Medicine: Since 1945; Science: Science and Popular Culture; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, eds., The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, 1992.
Robert Mullan Cook‐Deegan , The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome Project, 1994.

Susan Lindee