Genetics, Inheritance and the Human Genome

Genetics is the science of genes and heredity. Inside the nucleus of all your body cells are 23 pairs of chromosomes. Each chromosome carries hundreds to thousands of genes on it. Each gene describes some of your traits. Your hair color, eye color, allergies, body shape, how smart you are, your health, tastes, and on and on. These are all traits described by your genes. The genes describe these traits with a kind of code – a genetic code. The genetic code is found on a double strand all wound around on itself, called, DNA. Heredity is how we pass these coded traits on to our children.

One April 24, 2003, scientists at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that they had completed the sequencing of the human genome, 50 years to the day that Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick published the molecular structure of the DNA double helix. The decoding of the 3 billion DNA letters of the human genome is the result of one of the most ambitious scientific projects of all time, comparable to going to the moon and splitting the atom. This amazing achievement was accomplished by The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and included hundreds of scientists at 20 sequencing centers in the United States, Great Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan and China. These scientists recognized that the sequence of the human genome belonged to every human being and placed all of the sequence generated by the Human Genome Project into public databases freely available to scientists around the world with no restrictions on its use.