Crunching through the human genome

Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2001

The National Institutes of Health should complete sequencing of one-third of the human genome by the end of fiscal 2001, under performance goals set by President Clinton in his fiscal 2001 budget.

Decoding the mysteries of the strings of DNA code that make up the human genome — that is the sum of all the cells and their code in the human body — should help researchers and medical practitioners identify and then treat ailments, such as cancer or Lou Gehrig's disease, that have eluded medical cures. At the end of last year, researchers had sequenced 15 percent or 442 million base pairs of genes out of the almost 3 billion gene pairs in the human body.

The Energy Department, which has called upon its own cadre of world-class computer researchers and computational capacity to support the U.S. Human Genome Project, plans to completely sequence three out of the 24 human chromosomes by the end of fiscal 2001.