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When the Human Genome Project was declared completed in 2003, it had mapped 92% of genes, with the rest remaining a mystery for nearly two decades due to technological limitations. Now, scientists have finished sequencing the other 8%, and the human genome has finally been fully sequenced. Almost 100 scientists from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium collaborated on the project to map the entire human genome. The additional 8% that was sequenced accounts for 400 million new letters added to the existing sequenced DNA -- enough for an entire chromosome, as CNN reported. The additional genes are very important for adaptation,...

Scientists have sequenced the oldest complete human genome. The DNA comes from an anatomically modern man who roamed Western Siberia 45,000 years ago. It provides experts with a more accurate timeline of when modern humans mated with their Neanderthal cousins as they moved from Africa into Europe, between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. Scientists have sequenced the oldest complete human genome. The DNA comes from an anatomically modern man who roamed Western Siberia 45,000 years ago. His remains were fund near the settlement of Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia in 2008. The male lived around the time the populations of Europe...

Enlarge Image Zooming in. This diagram illustrates a chromosome in ever-greater detail, as the ENCODE project drilled down to DNA to study the functional elements of the genome. Credit: ENCODE project The human genome—the sum total of hereditary information in a person—contains a lot more than the protein-coding genes teenagers learn about in school, a massive international project has found. When researchers decided to sequence the human genome in the late 1990s, they were focused on finding those traditional genes so as to identify all the proteins necessary for life. Each gene was thought to be a discrete piece...

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”. His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been...

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”. His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been...

DR. FEERO is a family physician with a doctorate in human genetics from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a senior adviser for genomic medicine in the Office of the Director at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Our understanding of the genome is changing rapidly and drastically. For starters, the Human Genome Project has revealed that humans are, on a numerical basis, genetically less complex than a mustard plant (Arabidopsis). In fact, our genome contains between 20,000 and 25,000 sequences suggestive of “genes” encoding proteins, whereas Arabidopsis contains about 27,000. If that doesn't make much sense to you, don't...

Craig Venter is not a man who is inclined to underestimate himself. But then why should he? He beat the government's science bureaucrats in the race to decode the human genome. Fueled by $3 billion in taxpayer money, the federal Human Genome Project had waddled along for years until Mr. Venter, in 1998, managed to come up with private funding for a $300 million parallel research effort, Celera Genomics. He announced that his team would sequence the genome -- mapping the three billion DNA base-pairs that make up all 26,000 or so human genes (plus tracking long stretches of currently...

The Danish Council of Ethics has proposed a set of rules to deal with the prospective possibility that human and animal genes will be combined The first hybrid sheep-goat was created some 20 years ago, and science has since used cell and gene research to put a baboon heart into an infant and use other animal organs to save human lives. But where this technology will eventually lead to is of great concern to both the Danish Council of Ethics and the Council for Animal Ethics, who Tuesday presented their proposals for dealing with the unnerving prospect of combining human...

In his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton chose to emphasize something he had recently heard from a genome researcher: that humans are all, irrespective of race, 99.9% the same genetically. “Modern science,” he told his country's legislators, “has confirmed what ancient faiths have always taught: the most important fact of life is our common humanity.” Seven years on, and four years after the final publication of the sequences from the Human Genome Project, new technologies and larger data sets are allowing genome biologists to answer a conundrum embodied in that unity-inspiring percentage: if our DNA is...

Close window Published online: 22 November 2006; | doi:10.1038/news061120-9 Human genome more variable than previously thoughtSurprisingly large segments of DNA found to differ from person to person.Helen Pearson How alike are you and me? About 99.5%Getty Nearly six years after the sequence of the human genome was sketched out, one might assume that researchers had worked out what all that DNA means. But a new investigation has left them wondering just how similar one person's genome is to another's. Geneticists have generally assumed that your string of DNA 'letters' is 99.9% identical to that of your neighbour's, with differences...

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday. Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out. Several well-preserved mammoth carcasses have been found in the permafrost of Siberia, and scientists estimate that there could be millions more. Last year a Canadian team demonstrated that it was possible to...

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday. Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out...

The Human Factor :A man of science face Darwin and the Deity. by David Klinghoffer The Language of God A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins Free Press, 304 pp., $26 ------------------------------------- Head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins is among the country's foremost author ities on genetics, a staunch Darwinist, and a prominent critic of Intelligent Design. He's also an evangelical Christian who dramatically describes the moment he accepted Jesus as his personal savior. If that sounds like it might be a paradox, read on. Collins was hiking in the Cascade Mountains of western Washington...

Reason to Believe A leading geneticist argues that science can lead to faith. Reviewed by Scott Russell Sanders THE LANGUAGE OF GOD A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief By Francis S. Collins Here we are, briefly, under the sun, one species among millions on a gorgeous planet in the remote provinces of the universe, our very existence a riddle. Of all the words we use to mask our ignorance, none has been more abused, none has given rise to more strife, none has rolled from the tongues of more charlatans than the name of God. Nor has any word been...

I come back now and then to the subject of Darwinism not so much to get at an answer, but because of Darwin’s underpinning of the collapse of a God-inspired life of moral absolutes and the growth of the liberal religion of collectivism and doing whatever feels right.

Close window Published online: 17 May 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060515-12 Human genome completed (again)Scientists today publish the sequence of chromosome 1: the largest and last of the human chromosomes to be done and dusted. News@nature finds out what this latest milestone means.Helen Pearson Haven't scientists already announced the completion of the human genome? Well, yes. Twice. In 2000, two teams declared with great fanfare that they had produced a draft copy of the human genetic code, but there were many gaps and errors in this version. Another announcement, in 2003, marked the completion of a far more accurate 'finished' sequence...

Excerpt - LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world's most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome, the so-called "book of life." Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight percent of the human genetic code. It is packed with 3,141 genes and linked to 350 illnesses including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. "This achievement effectively closes the book on an important volume of the Human Genome Project," said Dr Simon Gregory who headed the sequencing project at the Sanger...

Yorktown Heights, NY, April 25, 2006 – IBM today announced its researchers have discovered numerous DNA patterns shared by areas of the human genome that were thought to have little or no influence on its function and those areas that do. As reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), regions of the human genome that were assumed to largely contain evolutionary leftovers (called “junk DNA”) may actually hold significant clues that can add to scientists’ understanding of cellular processes. IBM researchers have discovered that these regions contain numerous, short DNA “motifs,” or repeating sequence fragments,...

(snip) Most scholars now agree that hunters—more than climate change or a mystery epidemic—are what doomed the mammoths. Whatever the cause, by 11,000 years ago the king of the Pleistocene was a goner. (snip) If a group of devotees has its way, this shaggy ice-age mascot—and a host of other bygone megafauna besides—may yet walk again. (snip) The scientists, in other words, had managed to assemble half the woolly-mammoth genome; they claimed that in three years they could finish the job. That would put scientists within striking distance of an even greater feat: repopulating the earth with creatures that vanished...

The X PRIZE Foundation today announced the election of three new members to its Board of Trustees: J Craig Venter, Founder and President of the J. Craig Venter Institute and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation; Eric Anderson, President and CEO of Space Adventures, Ltd; and Takafumi Horie, CEO and President of livedoor, Co., Ltd. The X PRIZE Foundation is an educational 501(c)3 that uses competitions to create breakthroughs in space and related technologies for the benefit of humanity. On October 4th, 2004, the X PRIZE captured world headlines when Mojave Aerospace led by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen built...