alienation news

50 years on: global consortium spells out the 3 billion letters of the genome

Fifty years after the discovery of the structure of DNA, scientists from six countries announce today another landmark: they have sequenced the entire genetic code of a human being, to an accuracy of 99.999%.
Almost three years ago an international consortium funded by charities and governments, and a US private venture, simultaneously announced the completion of the "first draft" of the human genome.
It was likened at the time to the landing on the moon, the sonnets of Shakespeare and the invention of the wheel, but there was a problem: they had raced through the 3bn chemical letters of the code of life, leaving bits incomplete and regions strewn with errors.
The challenge was then to complete the entire text of a representative human, with an error rate of less than one in 100,000 letters, before April 25, the 50th anniversary of the publication of the double helix structure of DNA.