Ten Years After is one of the greatest blues bands of all time and featured the maniacal Alvin Lee whose frantic guitar solo on “I’m Going Home” at Woodstock is now part of rock n’ roll legend.  Unfortunately for the human genome project, ten years after its completion, its legacy is still in question.  Most of the recent discussion about the 10 year anniversary of the human genome being sequenced focused on the dearth of any new drugs resulting from the completion of this important milestone.  However, we learned a lot from the Human Genome Project (HGP), and it accelerated the identification targets for potential drugs and was a worthwhile step forward. 

In their excitement, scientists promoted their visions of what genomics might possibly bring and the media exaggerated those claims to the point where the public expected personalized medicines at their next visit to the doctor.  Biologists imagined that the letters of the genetic code that were being written down would create a great encyclopedia of life, complete with footnotes.  What they got instead was more beautiful – a spectacular hieroglyph revealing life’s enormous complexity, yet no Rosetta stone to decipher it.  

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of looking back on the ten years since the HGP.  We therefore thought it was only fair to turn our inquisitive eye back on ourselves and see what we wrote back then.  In Issue No. 392 from March 30, 2000, we said:

 ‘In short, genomics promises to increase the number of targets for drug development ten- to a hundred-fold. It is a major step forward and will provide the foundation for most drug development in the future. The bucket of cold water to throw on overly enthusiastic investors is that finding out what each gene does and validating it as a drug target requires years of work. That’s why we have been cautious about genomics picks in the past.’

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