What is the Human Genome Project? To understand the HGP one must know what a genome is. A genome is all the DNA in an organism including its genes. The genes carry information for making all the proteins needed by all organisms. The proteins establish what the organisms look like, how it fights infection, and how the organisms behave. This is a project with a 13-year effort that was begun in October 1990. This project has been planned to last 15 years, but because of all the technological advances, the expected completion date is now 2003. this project has five main goals to base the research upon. One is to distinguish all the approximate 100,000 genes in human DNA. Two is to be able to establish the sequences of the 3 billion chemical bases that make up the human DNA. They are also going to use this information and store it in databases as a third goal. The fourth goal is to create tools for data analysis. As a fifth and final goal, they are going to direct specific time to the ethical, legal, social issues that may be brought up by this project. The most important goal of the HGP is to obtain the DNA sequences of 3 billion DNA subunits present in the human DNA.
             The US HGP is lead by Ari Patrinos, which is head of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The progress toward HGP sequencing goals is 47% of 3 billion DNA base pairs. The working draft sequence goal is going to be 90% by the summer of 2000. The finished high-quality sequence is expected to be 100% by the year 2003. There are many laboratories around the US Receiving funding from either the Department of Energy or the National Institute of Health and sometimes both. The most funding for research is at numerous colleges, universities 33 in all, and laboratories. At certain times the Department of Energy funds about 200 separate principal investigators for the research provided for the HGP. The major HGP investigators are laboratories and 6 universities. The ...