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Human Genome Project: National Institutes
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The Human genome Project was a United States Government led effort, coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health to map the entire human genome. The project was begun in 1990 and the estimated time for completion was 15 years. Due to major technological advances the completion date was accelerated to 2003, two years ahead of schedule. One of the outcomes was the determination of three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.
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[One] of the working goals of the HGD Project should be the transfer of information via the international Internet, which has already become the dominant form of communication between Institutions and individuals involved in the Human Genome Project. As some regions of the world do not yet have a well-established infrastructure supporting network communications, this proposal might seem unworkable. However, there are recent, inexpensive technological developments which can be used to circumvent what might appear to be insurmountable difficulties. These include data transfer over short distances by radio and over longer distances by tapping into low-level satellites. Such developments are not yet widely used but the data coordinating centre for the HGD Project, in conjunction with the Database subcommittee for the project, should be regarded by the technical professionals in the regional collecting centres as a source of expert advice and support.
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Ensuring that the fruits of genome research were quickly translated into useful applications (and thence into jobs and wealth) became another process goal for the human genome project. Even as the various government programs noted above began to take shape, private interests ... began to mount genome research programs, some of them more significant than publicly funded programs in their nations. In the U.S., the Howard Hughes Medical Institute focused on issues not drawing sufficient attention from government, concentrating on databases and helping support the initiation of the Human Genome Organization to coordinate international efforts. In the U.K., the Imperial Cancer Research Fund was an equal partner with the government Medical Research Council early on, and the private Wellcome Trust made even larger investments in new genome research and informatics centers in 1992 and 1993. In France, the most vigorous genome research effort was supported by the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphism Humain (CEPH), which formed a partnership with the private French Muscular Dystrophy Association to establish the Genethon, a highly automated genome research facility outside Paris. This effort was started quickly and dwarfed the government genome research program.
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The U. S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health were the main research agencies responsible for developing and planning the Human Genome Project (National Human Genome Research Institute, 1999). Other centers around the world soon joined in the project, including the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom) (Cook-Deegan, 1994). By 1993, the Human Genome Project had become an established international effort, which included nine countries and the European Community (Cook-Deegan, 1994). Although any genome project center could determine a preferred method for generating sequencing data, all centers had to follow certain rules (Pennisi, 1998). The most significant rule was that the nucleotide sequences must contain no more than one error in every 10,000 bases, which represents an accuracy of 99.99%.
The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium included hundreds of scientists at 20 sequencing centers in China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the United States. The five institutions that generated the most sequence were: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston; Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis; Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, Cambridge, Mass.; DOE's Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, Calif.; and The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, England. (See List)
The National Institutes of Health, via the Center for Human Genome Research, initiated eleven "Genome Centers" between October 1990 and October 1992 in the United States. These included the two "factories" in Cambridge, Mass. and Iowa, mentioned above. Similarly, the Department of Energy created three centers of its own.
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