Human Genome Anniversary

So... back in 1990 the world's scientists embarked on a massive project to sequence the human genome. Officially the project ended in 2003, but the first publication of the draft human genome appeared in Nature on 15 Feb 2001 to great fanfare; this month marked the 20th anniversary of that feat.

To celebrate, Nature published a swath of commentaries and insights about the human genome. I had the pleasure of editing this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00314-6

And the anthropology journal I work for, SAPIENS, also hosted a column celebrating not just the human genome but the neanderthal one too, reflecting on what we've learned from both: https://www.sapiens.org/column/field-trips/human-genome-project-neanderthals/

In the Nature paper, the team dove through the landscape of publications on genes and other genetic material to map out how genetics has changed in 20 years. The upshot: 

- research teams have gotten bigger, but the human genome project wasn't actually some weird outlier in terms of team size, as many people believe. It was just part of the overall trend.

- research has been entirely focused on just a tiny subset of 'superstar' genes, and the authors of this piece argue that's inappropriate: it is, they argue, the result of research-begetting-more-research, rather than any intrinsic importance of the genes themselves. The scope should be widened!

- on the other hand, research has also exploded on the non-gene bits of our genome: all the "dark matter" that is actually important to how we operate.

- all the new drugs being licensed are targeted at known genes. That's not necessarily a good thing; it might be a good idea to develop drugs that act on bits of the genome other than genes, since those bits are important too.

I learned a lot from editing these two great pieces; it's amazing how far genetics has come in 20 years, and amazing what lies ahead!