Eric Lander: 'This is biology's periodic table'

Eric S. Lander is director of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Lander describes as the flagship research center for the government's Human Genome Project. CNN's Ann Kellan talked with Lander on June 1, 2000 about the importance of the project.

CNN: What is the role of this institute with this project?

LANDER: It's the flagship genome center. ... It's the largest of the genome centers in the international genome project. It has contributed more than a billion of the bases to the human genome project and about a third of the total sequence ... so it's by far the flagship of the project.

CNN: OK, so I am trying to graphically describe how you break this apart, and doing a comparison between what you are doing and what Celera is doing. Technically speaking, what is the difference in sequencing?

LANDER: There is actually a minor difference in the sequence approach being used in the public Human Genome Project and the private project at Celera. The private project at Celera is taking the large book of genomic sequence, shredding it up into pieces, tossing it onto the floor, and reassembling the letters.

What the public part is doing is taking the large book of genomic information, first breaking it into chapters, shredding each chapter and putting it on the floor, and reassembling the chapters. The only difference is whether you go through the intermediate step of first ripping the book into chapters and then into shreds or doing it all into shreds. The advantage of doing it in chapters is at least you know that every part that came from Chapter 752 goes back to Chapter 752. So you have more certainty about that. The disadvantage is it takes about 5 or 10 percent more work to first rip the book into chapters. It's, in a certain sense, a difference that only matters to sequencing aficionados.

CNN: So, do you have any concerns about Celera's approach?

LANDER: Well, I mean in the sense that all of the data in the public project are made freely available to everybody, including Celera, and we are very proud of that, it means Celera has the benefit of all those public data, so whatever problems there may be with assembling the genome correctly out of a whole genome shotgun, they are going to have the opportunity to check it against the chapter-by-chapter approach being done on the public project. So I think with the benefit of both data sets, whatever problems there might be can checked and corrected on the basis of the public data.

CNN: So the fact that they come out with an announcement first ...

LANDER: There is no race between the public and private sector, because the public sector releases its data every 24 hours. Our data is freely available on the Web every single day for everybody to use. We can't be in a race because we lose any race, we give away all our data, anybody who wants to beat us, all they have to do is sequence five letters of DNA and keep it secret and they have more data than we do because our data is totally, freely available. Because we can't beat anybody 'cause we give away all our stuff, we also can't lose. Our only goal is to make the data available.

CNN: Any concerns about the patenting issue?

LANDER: Sure, I think it actually is not so much a Celera issue. There is a general concern about the patenting of human genes. More than a decade ago, there began something of a land grab by companies that try to patent as many genes as possible, and while I'm very supportive of the concept of patenting, my sense is that we should award patent monopolies in return for commensurate work. Instead, the patent office, I feel, has been giving away patents for trivial amounts of work. You can get a patent, or used to be you could get a patent on a gene for merely describing a couple hundred letters of its sequence, just a snippet of the gene without the entire description of the gene, let alone its biological function or use in curing a disease. My own sense is, we should give patents, but the patents should go for the hard work ... for figuring out what a gene does and how to use it in a truly meaningful way.

CNN: So not necessarily a treatment for a ...

LANDER: For a real utility, not for a trivial description or a desultory application of a gene. The best would be patents for real treatments. But there may be patents for other uses that are real meaningful uses, and that's fine.

CNN: So you said a gene does a certain function, you could patent that just because you know.

LANDER: Just because you might be able to patent because the patent office will give you a patent, so if you're asking ...

LANDER: A patent should be awarded for real practical utilities. Merely describing the gene in terms of its letters or in terms of its biochemical functions -- it breaks an ATP molecule -- isn't really much of a description. It doesn't tell you anything medically or biologically useful. Patents are rewards that society grants inventors for making contributions and disclosing them. I have no problem with that, but the contribution should be substantial.

CNN: What's the deal with the insulin gene, was that patented, and the fact that we have insulin today is that because of this whole thing?

LANDER: ... Insulin goes back a long time. The fact we can make insulin from a human gene in a bioreactor is because someone cloned the gene in the 1970s and put in a bacteria and expressed it. But at that point the insulin, the insulin gene product, was well known and had been used in millions of people. What the patent was awarded for was a particular way to produce that protein.

CNN: And that's a legitimate use so the patent ...

LANDER: Sure ... Look, patents are a necessary thing in order to get companies to invest in projects. If a company spent $100 million on a clinical trial for a new treatment and some others come along as a Johnny-come-lately and sell the same product, well, why would the first company ever invest. So there is a need for patent protection when you have very expensive clinical trials involved, otherwise society won't get the investment it needs. On the other hand, if we give away the patents for trivial work instead of the hard work, that would have served society really poorly also, because when it comes to [rewarding] inventors for the hard work, describing how to really use the gene, I'm afraid we would have already given away the monopoly.

CNN: OK, do you guys use a supercomputer? If so, how? And why?

LANDER: You don't need supercomputers to analyze DNA. In fact, it's possible to assemble the whole sequence of the human genome without supercomputers. There is no particular need. For example, assembling the entire sequence of the fruit fly Drosophila we can do with standard computers around here in about two hours.

CNN: So, you're not using one [a supercomputer]?

LANDER: There is no need for a supercomputer to assemble the human genome sequence. The problem of assembling the human genome by computer [is] a significant computer problem, but it doesn't require a supercomputer by any means.

CNN: OK, the fact that the different methods didn't warrant supercomputers.

LANDER: No, we can do whole genome shock and assembly without a supercomputer, so that's not to say it's a good thing. It's fine to have a supercomputer. It's good to have a supercomputer. ... I don't fault anyone for having a supercomputer. I'm just saying we don't need a supercomputer.

CNN: OK, so we hear ATCG, this is for the lay audience here, we don't know what they are. Where do they fit into this sequence?

LANDER: The human genome is a code, a code written into four letters A, T, C and G, standing for the building blocks of DNA, and all of the information is encoded into a string of three billion of these A, T, Cs and Gs. Its sort of like any other text. English has 26 letters, DNA has four letters. The important point about this book of 3 billion letters is it has about 50,000 or so interesting paragraphs in it -- those are the genes. There is also a lot of stuff in it, about 95 percent of the book is not gene, it's stuff. We don't fully understand what it's in between, but about 5 percent of the book is pretty important text and it includes the instructions in that ATCG language for all the proteins in our body, for the carotene in our hair, the hemoglobin in our blood, the smell receptors in our nose, each of the 50,000 or so proteins in our body is written down; its composition is written down in this language of DNA.

CNN: Only 5 percent?

LANDER: Only about 5 percent of the human DNA encodes the proteins, the other 95 percent encodes a variety of other stuff like the middles of your chromosomes that let them separate properly, it encodes selfish transposable elements that are just hopped around your DNA and probably don't do you any good at all. It encodes all sorts of detritus on the whole, there isn't a lot of evolutionary pressure to get rid of this 95 percent of stuff. After all, human beings don't compete by how quickly they can replicate their DNA, and so having a large genome with extra stuff isn't [a] big evolutionary cost to us and therefore evolution just never tidied up the genome.

CNN: That's cool, I didn't realize that. How does that genetic code relate to protein? What's the relationship between the DNA and the protein?

LANDER: Each gene is a stretch of the DNA, and it's read out from its DNA form into an intermediate form called RNA ... it then goes off into a machine which translates it into a protein. It reads three letters of the text, maybe AGG, and then by some look-up table that it has, it puts in a certain building block of the protein corresponding to each three letters of the DNA and so it takes a DNA chain and by passing it through this funny little biological machine called a ribosome, it puts out a protein chain. That protein chain then folds up according to the laws of physics, it does its job. Its job might be to digest your lunch or make the structure of collagen in your skin.

CNN: So proteins are pretty key?

LANDER: Proteins do all of the work of the cell. Proteins are the components of your body that carry out all of the biochemical reactions, provide all the structures to your cells, send all the signals in your body, DNA is just the archive in which the instructions for making the proteins have been written down.

CNN: So, the DNA says to the protein, construct this way basically through RNA.

LANDER: That's right. The DNA is copied into an RNA copy and that's used as a set of instructions for making the protein and that goes on for each of the 50,000 proteins in your body. That, in some sense, is the secret of life. The secret of life is this huge diversity of components; 50,000 components are all specified in the same simple description of a DNA language.

CNN: About proteins?

LANDER: Well, we know thousands of the human proteins and what they do, but of the 50,000 proteins we probably don't know that much, about 80 percent of them. It takes fair amount of work to really learn all of the functions of a protein. Some of them we've known for 50 years, hemoglobin and how it carries oxygen in your blood, or carotene and how it provides the structure for your hair, but for many other proteins, ones that might involved sending a signal from a wound to tell cells in your body to come and help repair the wound, we might not know about its full capabilities to send signals and such. Every protein is its own story. There are 50,000 stories to be written about these proteins.

CNN: Would there be a comparable human genome project on proteins?

LANDER: Well, since you can read the proteins from the DNA, the idea is to read the DNA first, from that figure out what the proteins are and then study each of those proteins, and in fact that's what's going on. Many thousands of proteins, 10,000, are pretty well known today. Another 30,000 or 40,000 proteins are somewhat described and with the DNA you now know what the composition of the protein is and so you can go looking for it. In some sense the DNA gives you the building blocks, it gives you the periodic table of the elements. Chemistry made its progress in the 20th century because it had the periodic table describing the hundred or so building blocks of all matter. Hydrogen, helium and all this; biology is getting its periodic table. For the first time we know what the 100,000 or 50,000 building blocks of the human are, and I think the impact on biology of having its periodic table will be just the same as the impact on chemistry. It's going to change everything. Just like every molecule has to be described in terms of 100 or so atoms, every process in the body -- how a cancer cell works, how a fetus is developed -- all of this is going to have to be described in terms of this measly list of 50,000 or so genes. And knowing that you've got the finite list just changes the way you'd approach any problem in biology.

CNN: How would you describe the milestone that's being approached now?

LANDER: Well, the milestone is for the first time having a comprehensive list of all the parts. That doesn't mean we understand them. A Boeing 777 aircraft has 100,00 parts in it. Having a parts list doesn't tell you how to put it together and it doesn't tell you how it flies. That's about where we are right now with the human genome. For the first time we have the parts list, it doesn't tell us how to put it together, it doesn't tell us how the human being flies, but it provides us with the building blocks from which we can start working on medicine. In some sense it's a wonder we were able to practice medicine in the 20th century without knowing all the parts. For goodness sakes, you'd never take your car to an auto mechanic who didn't even know the parts in the car, imagine somebody trying to fix a problem with your car not even starting and not even knowing what the components were that led up to the starter motor. Well, we bring our bodies into doctors all the time and they don't know the parts list, they're not even as advanced as the auto mechanic is. The genome project is an attempt to change that, to give medicine that parts list. It's not going to cure all diseases but it's a foundation for a more rational approach to medicine. I think it's going to transform biology in medicine.

CNN: How long have you been working on this?

LANDER: In some sense, I've been working on the genome project for about 15 years, since its inception. The genome project really got its start with the debate in 1986 at Cold Spring Harbor amongst a lot of scientists as to whether we should really go off and try to get all of this information, and at the time, it was madness to think we could collect 3 billion letters of information from the whole genome. I was there at the debate and it was heavy times, it was tremendous excitement, and I was just starting out then in 1986 and I remember that debate well. [We] thrashed around for a year or two after that, then we decided we had to go for it even though we never had a clue of how to do this, and remarkably the scientists convinced Congress that trust us, we would put in place a steady program that would produce the methods to make this possible by about 2005. And darn if the whole thing didn't happen and actually quite a bit faster than that. It was a tremendously exciting time, but in some sense it's just a race up to the starting point. The real fun starts now.

CNN: How are you feeling about it, happy?

LANDER: Having spent 15 years knowing all the things that one could do and I could do and my students could do having the sequence of the human genome, it has been so exciting over the last 12 months to watch the sequence pour out and having all these things that were just a gleam in our eye become a practical reality in our lab. It is a heady time. The speed at which sequencing has been coming out has been stunning. For the last six months, the rate at which new DNA letters have been going into the public databases has been 10,000 new letters of human DNA every minute. In the course of a one-hour TV program, if you watch a one-hour sitcom during the course of that, 600,000 letters of new human DNA were deposited in the public databases. It's amazing the rate of data production.

CNN: And you started out with dropping how many letters when it first started?

LANDER: Oh goodness ... 80 percent, 90 percent of all the data, has been produced in the last 14 months. Most of the 1990s were devoted to developing the methods to make this possible. We started the 1990s without a clue as to how we were really going to do this. The work was not so much sequencing the letters of the DNA but working out a way to do it in the first place, and then working out a way to do it in an organized streamlined fashion, and then working out a way to analyze the info and put it together. A pilot project began in 1990 and then a very directed project in 1996 and the starting point for the real production sequence was March of 1999 and now here we sit 14 or 15 months later and the vast majority of the work got done in those 14 months because of the nine or 10 years of preparatory work.

CNN: So, now you've said, Now I can get this cured, that cured, etc.

LANDER: Knowing the sequence of the human genome is a starting point, it doesn't guarantee that we're going to be able to cure disease. Instead it's the starting point for being able to understand the basis of disease, the thing is we haven't known in the 20th century -- what the real cause of heart disease is, cancer, of asthma, diabetes. For the first time scientists are going to be able to work out those causes. Knowing the causes doesn't guarantee that we're going to be able to get cures, but the knowledge sure beats ignorance if you're trying to fashion a cure, so yes cures will come from this, but they're not going to flow immediately. The first product is going to be understanding the basis of the disease and then attempts to treat disease.

CNN: Will there be a comparable [protein] project?

LANDER: Once we know the sequence of the genome, we can work out the sequence of all the proteins in the body. But the next step is to also work out their shape, their three-dimensional shape. There is a lot of excitement about a project now to try to work out the shapes of all of the proteins in the body. Turns out it takes some fancy chemical tricks to do this, but if you can work out the shapes, you can figure out how they function as little molecular machines.

CNN: So shapes of the protein matter?

LANDER: The way every protein works is based on its shape. An enzyme that digests your some of your food works because there is a little pocket in the middle of that enzyme molecule where sugar will fit and the enzyme will break the sugar apart. All protein function comes from protein shape. So once we've got a basic description of the chain that makes up a protein we need to know how it folds up to do its job. And so a project that will flow out of the genome sequencing project is a protein structure project to get the architecture of each of these 50,000 components in our body.

CNN: Are you in favor of that, and the taxpayers putting in money into something like that?

LANDER: On the whole I think any good activity has to reinvest in its foundations. To me the genome project has been a modest investment, it's been 1 percent of the NIH budget going to laying this foundation. I think that sort of investment of 1 or 2 or 3 percent of the research budget going to laying an infrastructure is a very wise investment. Otherwise each scientist has to go work out the sequence of the genome for him or herself and the structure of the protein for him or herself. But it's much more efficient to do it in an organized fashion and make that data freely available to everybody.

LANDER: Oh goodness, there are many steps that will come out the human genome project. The next step really is to understand the function of all these genes. Where they are turned on in the body. What role they play in the circuitry of life. Which genes turn on which other genes, and how they signal through each other. And after all, the genome project is only giving us a parts list. It hasn't told us how the parts connect and what their functions are. And so there is a whole world called functional genomics. Which attempts now to take that same global comprehensive high (inaudible) approach that has characterized the genome project and apply it now to understanding the functions of the components. I think we're are only seeing the beginning of these sorts of projects to lay before the scientific community all these building blocks and an understanding of it which then people studying different diseases can then pick up and use.

CNN: So you a project for the function of the genes and the shape of the proteins?

LANDER: Now I'm not ... I don't believe that all of these projects are going to look like the human genome project. Many of these projects may be highly decentralized projects. Some of these projects will be, might be very long-term projects. In many of the cases we don't have the tools yet to do it or the understanding yet to do it and they'll start much like the genome project did by building the tools first. What I think is there is a whole new world that's just been discovered. We are reading a text that's 3.5 billion years old. In fact not just the human text, but ... the text of the mouse and many other organisms. Life has kept notes over 3.5 billion years of evolution. And for the first time we're getting to read those notes. There are going to be huge projects to try to understand what this vast library of information tells us.

CNN: Is the fact that we know the genome sequence going to speed up cures?

LANDER: The availability of the human genome sequence is certainly going to vastly accelerate the search for disease genes and the understanding of the basis of disease. Right now it's a huge amount of work or at least it has been a huge amount of work to find the genes that are responsible for diabetes or for heart disease. It is so much work that a really young smart medical researcher couldn't do it on his or her own. Only large teams could tackle a problem like that. What the genome project is doing is it's lowering the barriers to tackling problems like that. So I think the real return of this big science project will be that thousands of young smart energetic investigators are going to be able to tackle the problem of understanding the basis of disease on their own. And that's going to accelerate research tremendously because when we can empower individual researchers to take on a problem and solve it because they don't have to do all the drudge work, boy will that change the speed of discovery.

Now none of that guarantees that we're going to cure anybody's particular disease in any particular time frame. It is really important to understand that we're incredibly excited about how this is going to transform scientific research, but promising that's going to cure cancer in any short time frame [is] not the sort of thing we ought to do. It is understanding. Nothing beats understanding in terms of long-term promise. And that's what this product is going to give us, an understanding of biology. It is a firm foundation for the future.

CNN: OK, the gaps being left in yours and the gaps in Celera: Is there a difference?

LANDER: No it's sort of boring.

CNN: And why are there gaps at all?

LANDER: The way that the DNA sequence is being read in all projects -- public projects, private projects -- involves a certain amount of random reading of pieces of the genetic code and pasting it together. At some point you've got the vast majority of the code, but there are still gaps because you haven't randomly picked up those pieces at that point which is roughly the point we're at. You can do the vast majority of the work but there are still gaps in the picture. The picture has emerged very clearly but the jigsaw puzzle still has pieces missing in certain parts. And so the genome projects are going on to fill in all of those missing jigsaw piece puzzles, but medical researchers aren't waiting for that to start using the whole picture that's emerging.

CNN: So are there key gaps? How do you know?

LANDER: No, you don't. I mean if you have 90 percent of the picture, then 90 percent of what you're looking for is there. What's really changed was that a year or so ago we maybe had 10 or 15 percent of the picture. We've now got something like 90 percent of the picture and suddenly you've moved from a world where whatever answer you're looking for was almost surely not in the picture to almost surely is in the picture. And surely some of the pieces will fall in some missing gap, but it's a small minority now. And it means that scientists can kind of count on the fact that they can look at that genome list for whatever they're searching for. Within a year or so the vast majority of those gaps will be tidied up and it'll probably take another year or so after that before every last letter in ambiguity has been perfectly cleaned up.

But I must say at the end of the day scientists are very pragmatic folks. Once most of the information is there, we're all going to race on to start using it even as we tidy it up and finish it up and perfect it.

CNN: Now can genes change in your lifetime?

LANDER: Well the basic genetic code that you have is the same in every cell and doesn't change over the course of your life except as mutations may occur in certain cells. And so certainly as each cell is reproduced mutations can occur. Usually they are utterly irrelevant, they occur in a meaningless harmless bit in your DNA or you have the other chromosome present in the cell that you got from your other parent that carries a working copy of the gene but some of those mutations will give rise to genetic changes that cause cancer.

And so in fact cancer is a disease of genetic change in one of your cells that then goes on, because of those genetic changes, to grow, gain more changes, grow more. And so on one level your genetic code doesn't change over the course of your life across your whole body, but individual cells can see mutations and they can make the difference between life and death when it comes to cancer.

CNN: Some have broken down the difference in techniques as clone by clone, and whole genome ...

LANDER: That's right, it's tearing up the whole book or tearing up the chapters first and then shredding the chapters. That's the thing: whole genome means shred up the whole book, put it back together, the other one, tear it into chapters first and then shred each chapter. The advantages if you do it chapter by chapter, it means when you're putting the sentences back together there is no chance that you've put one sentence into the wrong chapter. On the other hand it costs a little up-front to break it into chapters first. It is not a big difference. I mean my own thinking is that the right way to sequence a genome in the future will be a little bit of both. That the techniques are quite complimentary and scientists are not going to be fussy about using in fact a hybrid strategy between the two.

CNN: Do you like the fact that there are two?

LANDER: Oh yeah ... complementary methods ... science works by having a variety of different techniques and when you try different methods you find that each has their own advantages. And you get an improved method at the end by blending them. That's all right ... it's not an either-or case . This is a situation where we'll learn a lot and in the end, we'll blend it together.

CNN: With the proteins, though, what are the proteins' value as far as pharmaceuticals, as treatments, and will knowing about proteins help in developing diagnostic tools and if so how?

LANDER: Yeah. Proteins are the targets of most drugs. When you take aspirin, it's affecting a protein in your body. When someone takes Viagra it's affecting a protein in their body. Almost all of the small molecule pharmaceuticals that you might pop in a pill work because they bind to, stick to a protein and change its function in some way. That's the basis of pharmaceutical medicine.

CNN: Wow. So would you patent proteins or treatments?

LANDER: That's the interesting thing. ... A small proportion of proteins are drugs themselves. Insulin is a protein. And that's administered to the body. There are growth hormones that are proteins and they are administered to the body. And in that case the drug you're giving is actually a protein itself, but the vast majority of pharmaceutical medicine is about giving not a protein but a small molecule that's been discovered and developed to stick [to] some protein in your body. In that case patents on the proteins are much less important. It is a question of understanding which proteins to bother making a small molecule against. And then you really need patent protection on the small molecules that you take and they bind your own natural proteins.

CNN: So in genetics, will knowing the genes ... affect developing treatments?

LANDER: Knowing the genes tells us what the targets are for developing drugs. So if we're trying to understand what's wrong in asthma what we really mean is which proteins should we make a drug against in order to shut down the inflammatory process of asthma. So when we talk about understanding a disease, we mean understanding it as a mechanism, as a cascade, as a machine of proteins, so that we know where we would like to throw a monkey wrench into that apparatus to stop the disease process. And that monkey wrench is called a drug.

CNN: Would you throw that monkey wrench into the gene or the protein?

LANDER: No you throw it to the protein. You throw it to the protein. The genes tell us the parts. We then come to understand ... how they function together and we make the drug against the protein encoded by the gene.

CNN: You wouldn't say you fiddled with the instructions?

LANDER: Nope ... there are ideas of how to do things like that, but almost all therapy today involves fiddling by putting in a molecule that affects the protein, not the instructions for it.

CNN: And what about cancer ... When you say there are mutations caused ... would that be fiddling with the gene?

LANDER: Well the mutations fiddle with the gene to make unusual proteins but if you're going to cure cancer you're going to have act on the proteins that are made. In some sense ...

CNN: Not change the mutation?

LANDER: No, turns out not to be a good strategy ... it's the instruction book. We're reading the instruction book so that we can understand all the parts. But when we actually want to treat people we have to treat the parts. We're not treating the instruction book.

CNN: So why would you patent genes?

LANDER: It is a fine question. And most cases the gene patent is not going to be the most important thing, it's fairly unimportant. Technically this is probably not of use for your audiences, technically the patents claim the right to use the protein in an assay to discover the drug. So the patent on the gene is the patent on using that protein in a dish to discover a drug that interacts with it. Once you've discovered that molecule, you're not really using the protein anymore. So it's only on using it during the discovery process.

CNN: That you need the gene?

LANDER: That you need the gene. And so it's a much limited patent use. And it may be that you can do that discovery in some other country where the patent doesn't apply. So it's not at all clear that this is such a big deal.

CNN: So the patenting gem would be that molecule that affects the protein?

LANDER: That's what the pharmaceutical companies care about most is the patent on the molecule that you're going to put in the bottle.

CNN: And they couldn't do a patent to say to some other company don't touch that protein?

LANDER: Well people are trying. Just as scientific technology is advancing so too is legal technology advancing and the lawyers are working on ways to try to do that ... and they have their own genome project I'm sure to work on these sorts of things.

CNN: Unfortunately for us ...

LANDER: [Laughs] So I wouldn't underestimate advances in legal technologies but ...

CNN: So, OK, at this milestone how would you characterize this in big science ... like walking on the moon?

LANDER: Sure. Everybody wants to know what's the right analogy for the human genome project. Some people have called it the Holy Grail. I don't like that idea at all ... the Holy Grail? Nobody was really sure what it was. Everybody spent their lives searching for it and they usually died trying. Not a good analogy. Other people said it's biology's Manhattan Project.

Oh! What a terrible analogy! For a world already concerned about genetic technologies, analogizing it to something that blows up at the end ... bad idea. Then there are those that say it's like going to the moon. I don't think that's a terribly good analogy either. We did set that as a great target. We did go to the moon. We went back a few times. We visited. We even played a few rounds of golf up there.

But we don't go back and visit the moon again. It hasn't become part of our daily lives, whereas the genome we're going to use every day. Now, the right analogy for the human genome project is chemistry's periodic table. It is the one event you can point to in science where science was transformed from some vague fuzzy infinite frontier where there might be any number of elements and you didn't know you had them all to a finite list of matter. This is biology's periodic table and that's the right analogy for what's going on.

Students in the 21st century, they are not going to be able to imagine what it was like to do biology in the 20th century before you knew all the parts list. It is going to transform the way they look at their world and they're going to look back on 20th century biology as this wonderfully undeveloped barbaric period and they are going to wonder how anybody got anything done.

Of course within a decade or two students are going to imagine the human genome sequence was always known since Aristotle or Newton or something like that. And in some sense, that's the really great reward for working on a project like this, is it's going to become so fundamental and so essential that everyone's going to take it for granted and that's a good thing.

CNN: Do you worry about the bad?

LANDER: Of course I'm worried about the uses. I want to be proud ... no ... I want my children and my children's children to be proud of what we did in producing the human sequence of the genome and that's only going to happen if we match the scientific progress with the social progress. We need laws to protect privacy, laws that guard against genetic discrimination, laws that guarantee that there isn't discrimination in insurance. We also need to make sure that society doesn't misunderstand that our knowledge of genes doesn't imply that we're nothing but our genes, that we're genetically determined. I think there are tremendous benefits that will come to medicine from genetics, but we'll only reap those benefits if we as a society, not just the scientists but everybody in society, comes to understand what the choices of the genome are and pulls together to make those choices as a society.

There are things we should never do. You could imagine making genetically modified people with new genes. That's a scientific possibility but there is no reason we should take that possibility. You could imagine all sorts of ways you could misuse this information, but this information is so fundamentally important to understanding that it would be immoral not to gain this information because of what its value to medicine and people would be but it would be equally immoral to stop at just gaining the information and not pushing the social discussion and making the hard social decisions about how we're going to use it.

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