Genome research findings a "bad day for racists" -- French minister

Genome research findings a "bad day for racists" -- French minister
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

FEB 13: An international public consortium of scientists working on the Human Genome Project (HGP) today formally published the first detailed assessment of the genome - and confirmed humans have much less genes than previously thought.

"It's a bad day for racists and those with xenophobic tendencies," said France's Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg, underlining another of the project's key findings - that all humanity shares more than 99 per cent of an identical genetic code.

Press conferences in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington heard details of what scientists have been calling an extraordinary trove of information about human development, physiology, medicine and evolution.

Although the findings published today will have a crucial bearing on medical and scientific research, perhaps the most astonishing aspect is the confirmation that humans have much fewer genes than was previously thought.

"We have found about 30,000 - 40,000 genes in the human genome, only about twice as many as in a worm," said Dr Beatrice Renault, of the magazine Nature, which published the draft DNA sequence of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium today.

"There are not as many as we had thought, but the genes are much more complex."

Humans have only about 10,000 more genes than a nematodeworm and 20,000 more than a fly, two laboratory models whose genomes have already been mapped. In London, British researchers said today that the human genome is not for sale, and it would have been "criminal" if information on how it is structured had become the sole property of a private company.

"Others want to charge the rest of the human race a fortune to read our own genetic code," John Sulston, leader of the British team who took part in the international project to decipher the genome, told a press conference here.

"But we're here to tell them that the human genome is not for sale," he added, in an implicit criticism of research carried out by the private US firm Celera Genomics.

The US company is a scientific and economic rival of the international Human Research Project, in which Britain took part.

Celera began its work to decipher the human genome in 1998, while the government-funded, multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project officially began in 1990.