Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was a multinational effort, initiated in 1990 under the international administration of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) and coordinated by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, with additional US universities and international partners including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, India and China; the project formally began in 1990 and was declared complete in 2003. The main aims of the project were:

I. Mapping the entire human genome at the level of nucleotide sequences.

II. Storing the information collected from the project in databases.

III. Developing tools and techniques for analysis of the data.

IV. Transfer of the related technologies to the private sector, such as industries.

V. Taking care of the legal, ethical and social issues that may arise from the project.

HGP was closely tied to the rapid growth of a new field, bioinformatics, since making sense of billions of bases of sequence data required new computational tools. …