Ten years on

Here is a graph showing the results of a Nature poll asking scientists what the human genome project has meant to them, 10 years on. Sequencing technology wins. But then, technology is not only the darling of our society, it is the career-maker for many of those polled, and it applies across the board in the life sciences. And with technology comes new knowledge. Much of it is truly new: unexpected findings about DNA functions. But even if we know much, much more, our basic theoretical understanding of life and its evolution have not really changed as a result.

Of course, as the graph also shows, this doesn't mean that most scientists would say that technology's the only benefit. In fact, most do say they would have their genome sequenced if it were cheaper (though the results don't show what their interest is in having the sequence), but 16% wouldn't have their genome sequenced if you paid them. The poll, but not the graph, also shows that

[m]ore than one-third of respondents now predict that it will take 10–20 years for personalized medicine, based on genetic information, to become commonplace, and more than 25% even longer than that. Some 5% don't expect it will happen in their lifetime.

Why Nature should have taken this poll this is revealing. Revealing of Nature's nature as a magazine, of the social and also vested-interest aspect of science. Ten years is not a magic number, and there's no real bottom line finding in genomics or genetics as a result of the last decade. Genome data have streamed out before and since 10 years ago, and the 'announcement' of the human genome sequence was itself a highly staged event, for publicity and other aspects of funding politics.

Genomic and genetic research have prospered in the last decades, at an accelerating pace, and across the spectrum of the life sciences. The availability of the data, and of the technology to generate that data, including experimental technologies for developmental biology, has been enormously productive and helpful. It changes everything we do. But it is not associated with any fixed point in time. That's melodrama, and the fact that scientists pay any attention to it reflects some of the material and career interests much more than anything to do with the science itself. True scientific advances aren't adjudicated by popularity polls.

Whether a scientist would get his/her own genome sequence is like that, too. Most scientists, like most lay people, have not got a very clear idea what can and can't be predicted from a genome sequence. And how could they? Everyone in and out of science is being bombarded by all sorts of lobbying, advocacy, sales pitches, fear-mongering about funding, skepticism based on scientific argument, skepticism based on politics, and so on.

So, those MT readers who are not in science would have a hard time making much sense of such an informal poll. But that's OK, because the poll makes no difference to what's going on in science.