Human Genome Project Monday 26th June 2000 is a day to be remembered. Begun in 1990, the U.S. Human Genome Project is a 13-year effort coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The project originally was planned to last 15 years, but effective resource and technological advances have accelerated the expected completion date to 2003. Project goals are to identify all the approximate 30,000 genes in human DNA, determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, store this information in databases, improve tools for data analysis, transfer related technologies to the private sector, and address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project. In 1991 in the USA alone $130 million was spent on it. In 1998 the expenditure was $250 million. And there are now teams in some 18 other countries involved in the effort. Britain's Sanger Centre at Cambridge, funded to the level of £210m by the Wellcome Trust, contributed about a third of the sequence data obtained so far. However, the draft contains gaps and errors, and there are genetic differences between human individuals. So, the results won't be very useful in helping doctors to treat diseases.   Relating Topics - Sanger's Method of DNA Sequencing