Biology's version of the Book of Life is being written, in part, on the 14th through 16th floors of a gleaming medical tower at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Most workers are under 30 and hold 'entry-level' positions. Few hold graduate degrees and some haven't finished college. It seems an unlikely setting for what President Clinton in March called 'the scientific breakthrough of the century, perhaps of all time.'
The technicians are nearly finished 'sequencing' the entire human genome; that is, determining the order of the three billion pairs of nucleotides that make up human DNA. The Human Genome Sequencing Centre at Baylor is one of five major sequencing centres in the US, with another in Britain and minor centres scattered around the world. Together they make up the decade-old Human Genome Project, an international consortium directed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy.
