According to today's The New York Times, next week the Journals "Science" and "Nature"
will independently publish two long articles reporting the latest results from the analysis of
the human genome. The rival teams from Celera and The National Institute Of Health
come to similar conclusions. One surprise is that humans only have about 30,000 genes,
just a year or so ago most were saying the number would be between 100,000 and 120,000.
Another surprise is that they could only find about 300 human genes that did not have a
counterpart in the mouse genome. Although it may hurt our pride to know that Shakespeare
and Einstein only had a third more genes than a roundworm I think it's good news; the fewer
the genes the easier human genetic engineering will be.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:38 MDT