 We're having the genetic code changes the way we look at everything. Really allows the individual and individual creativity and insight and intuition to really come to the fore again in biology. In 1960, there were so many things we said, will we ever be able to do these things? I don't think we never even thought about sequencing the genome. Such simpler things seemed daunting at the time. And here I was sitting 30 years later and there was a sequence of the genome in front of me. And I just had this sense of history coming together, the pace of history, moving at an incredible rate. And in fact, it has changed biology, there's just no question that we've moved into a new era. We're accumulating data in orders of magnitude more rapidly than we were before. In fact, I would go so far as to say, for the first time we now have the tools commensurate to the task of understanding biological systems. There's going to be a bright line in history and the bright line in history is going to start with the first genome going forward because it's so revolutionary, completely revolutionized as how science is done, the pace of which science is done, the pace of which discoveries are made and will ultimately revolutionize medicine. Most of the analysis of genome sequences is really focused on the genes for obvious reasons, but the bits of code for proteins and how many proteins they make and what of those proteins are, what the so-called proteome of each individual genome is. What that has revealed is not simply where the genes are, which is an important thing to know, but it's shown us that mother nature is conserving far more than the genes. It's conserving segments up and down the genome, and for the most part we don't have the slightest idea why she has done that. This is going to be grist for the male for the next 10 to 20 years. For protein coding reasons, we have the genetic code, we've had that for some time. We don't really understand how to interpret the DNA sequence of the rest of the genome, and the best method, it turns out, for doing that is to rely on evolution. Let me take the example of the fruit fly. If I showed you a Drosophila melanogaster and a Drosophila pseudobscuro, for all intents and purposes they would look identical to you, yet they're 60 million years different in evolution. If you look at the genome sequences, only those sequences that had some selective advantage that were important would be conserved. I think a lot of the challenges in genomics are really to understand what the rest of the DNA does in the organism. Comparative genomics, I think, is going to be one of the most exciting areas for the next probably 10 to 20 years. For one thing, I think it is the only way we're going to really begin to understand the human genome. For myself as a mouse biologist, one of the most exciting things to do right now is to take a segment of a chromosome from mouse and compare it base for base to the same segment from the human genome. For one thing what it does is it tells us it identifies every single important segment of that chromosome because it's the part that mother nature has chosen to conserve in the 50 to 75 million years since mouse and human separated from one another. The 21st century is rapidly turning into something that's half experimental and half an information science, a science where there's as much to be gained from mining data in fast public databases. You will not be able to do biology going forward without being incredibly computer literate. We'll be able to eliminate 99% of the random experiments and use the computers to narrow down using all this information of what is the key experiment to do that will advance science. Now the scientists mid-century, they purified the DNA molecule away from the cell. The human genome project now purified the information away from the DNA molecule and that's going to be as profound transformation in this century. Having the genome sequences there, having it available on a computer really allows the individual and individual creativity and insight and intuition to really come to the fore again in biology. Now when everything's in the database, people can begin to think and design particular experiments. They can go back to the original idea, the creative idea and they can be much more enabled. So I think it really enables the small research scientists. It also enables the theoretical biologists. So if you had asked me five years ago to name the successful theoretical biologist in the world, I would have named Francis Crick and there would have been a long pause and I'd say I'm sure there must be somebody else but I can't think of who they are. I think now we're really engendering a field where these massive data sets are being generated, made freely available. There's really an opportunity for people to come in and interpret data. It really brings the intellectual content back into research and really makes the individual, not even the individual group but the individual person a real unit of scientific discovery again. So I think it's tremendously liberating. I think this is the groundwork for the human biology and the medicine of the future. As a physician it is the medical implications of the genome project that have always seemed to me the most compelling. The reason to do this, the chance to alleviate suffering, to cure diseases that we currently have little to offer for, that's why we're doing this. My favorite way of looking at the impact of the genome is a story which actually didn't involve sequencing of the genome, involved sequencing of a gene. It was a gene that we discovered years ago in a cancer inducing virus which controlled the growth properties of cells, was an oncogene, and was discovered to be in a human cancer, the critical element that led to the human cancer. And Novartis, drug company, took that information and built a compound which inhibits that enzyme. And that has now revolutionized the treatment of the disease, chronic myelogenous leukemia, the drug being Gleavec. That's the poster child, because that's what basic molecular information can lead you to. It can lead you to drugs that are specific, that are powerful, that are safe. So we can design preventive drugs or design proteins or design genes or whatever. And in doing so, I expect we'll add easily 20 plus years to the average lifespan, and those 20 plus years will be productive and creative years. And parenthetically, that poses a really interesting challenge for society of how we treat older people. Well, knowledge, particularly large increases in knowledge, always have major effects on society. And this is knowledge about living organisms, and of course that includes us. While there's a genetic component to almost everything, there's a huge difference between the physical and the actual life outcomes, and the future of medicine will have to deal with that difference. And this quite naturally leads to the whole issue of genetic privacy. So if we know all of your predispositions, who has a right to have that information, does your insurance company, does your employer, does your family, do your friends? I mean, where do we draw the boundaries for these kinds of things? A lot of patients are going to push their doctors for information, which is going to force the doctors to educate themselves, even if they don't want to necessarily. So if a patient comes in and says, you know, I have breast cancer, what's the likelihood my kids, my daughters are going to get breast cancer, you better go look it up. But patients will, I think, drive the medical community even faster than they were prepared to go by asking the right questions and not resting until they get the answers. We're going to see miracles. We're going to see miracles of all sorts coming out of the molecular information that we have, translated through chemistry, translated through clinical experience, and that's what this is all about.