PRESSING AHEAD WITH HUMAN GENOME SEQUENCING

While waiting for revolutionary techniques to emerge, conventional approaches have been used to generate more than 40 million bases of DNA sequence from large scale projects involving different organisms. About eight megabases are from the human genome. Does this progress signal the time to move ahead for a massive human genomic sequencing effort, or should we bide our time, waiting for more technical developments? The answer is to move ahead now, choosing carefully those strategies that can be easily adapted to future methodologies.