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Genome opens new perspective
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SCIENTISTS published their first attempt to decipher the map of the human genome on Monday. Beyond its significance as a scientific milestone, the map of the genome has produced a host of new questions that may change the way humans regard themselves.
Among the most fundamental questions is what it means to be human in light of the tiny genetic variation between man and other animals, considered until now vastly inferior.
From the lowly earthworm to the tiny fly, from the mouse to man, and between humans of every colour and race, the similarities of the genome are more striking than the differences.
The human genome includes some 30,000 genes, only about three times the number that form the genome of the tiny fruit fly, while the nematode worm boasts some 20,000. Even the Pseudomonas aeruginosa, microscopic bacteria, is only a little less complex genetically that man.
Now the genome has been successfully mapped, scientists are examining how tiny differences in the so-called "book of life" can have such radically different developmental consequences.
"The challenge now will be to stop thinking about one gene at a time and start trying to understand the whole set at once as a complex system -- to think about how such a small number of genes can generate a fly or a person," said Barbara Jasny, a senior editor at Science.
The contents of the book of life, only partially digested by even the most avid readers, can be unsettling, she admitted, as the genome gives us an entirely new perspective on life.
"Landing a person on the moon gave us an extraterrestrial perspective on human life; atomic fission gave us the power to create enormous energy reserves and to extinguish all human life on Earth; and now the human genome sequence gives us a view of the internal genetic scaffold around which every human life is molded," she said.
"This scaffold has been handed down to us from our ancestors, and through it, we are connected to all other life on Earth," she added.
Some of those connections may appear too close for comfort, given the human genome and the genome for the chimpanzee are almost identical.
Differences between species are indeed small, while differences between races are barely apparent.
Every living being bears 99.99 per cent of the same genetic structure and members of different races can be even closer genetically than members of the same race.
(SD-Agencies)
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