THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 11, 1995 TAG: 9510110504
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
Call it the moon shot of biology: an ambitious 15-year effort to push across barely charted frontiers to a radically new understanding of human development and human disease.
The Human Genome Project - intended to mark the exact location of each of the estimated 100,000 genes that comprise the human genetic blueprint - has just entered the second of three planned five-year phases.
According to Paula Gregory, chief of genetics education at the National Center for Human Genome Research, average Americans will be the big winners when the project ends in October 2005.
``We're in the wilderness making a map,'' Gregory said. ``We're making exponential progress. We are moving medicine from a totally treatment mode to a preventative mode.''
Speaking Tuesday to an auditorium packed with several hundred NASA Langley Research Center scientists and engineers, Gregory outlined the daunting challenges, and the dazzling opportunities, facing participants in the $2 billion effort.
Pushing researchers, she said, is the conviction that from cancer, to aging, to baldness, cure is embedded in the genetic code. Getting at the cures will take much longer than map-making, Gregory admitted, perhaps as much as 25 years beyond the genome project's end.
Thus far, roughly 8,000 human genes have been identified, less than one percent of the total. Since the late 1980s, however, the pace of that identification has accelerated rapidly, led by refinements in laboratory techniques and vastly increased computer power.
Gregory said that one disease-causing gene was fingered in 1989. In 1995, four to five genes a week, of all kinds, are being pinpointed. That figure should rise to six a week in 1996 and continue to climb.
Even at that pace, Gregory contended, good results are already making themselves known.
``The immediate medical benefits are diagnostic, which will lead to prevention,'' she said. ``You won't get an Alzheimer's gene test at your corner doctor's tomorrow, but soon we hope to identify genetic predispositions toward diabetes and heart disease which affect millions and millions of Americans.
``As the map become more complete, the process becomes quicker and easier. What we hope will come out of this is better drug treatments.''
Treating or curing genetic disease has proven elusive. To date, gene therapy has been expensive and required repeated applications for the relative few patients worldwide undergoing treatment.
The theory behind the therapy - once and for all reprogramming a cell's DNA by sending in new genetic instructions on cell-penetrating but harmless viruses - is sound.
But the body's resilient and redundant immune system seeks out and destroys the defanged viruses, or the repair genes miss their targeted marks, or the targeted cells don't divide often enough for the repair genes to replicate and correct the condition.
``It's like planting petunias with a backhoe,'' Gregory conceded. ``You get the job done, but it's not pretty and it's not precise.''
Gregory said the genome effort is notable as the first large-scale science program to officially include ethics as scientists ponder how to apply the genetic information they glean. What is to be done for those identified as carriers of defective genes, Gregory wonders, when they are denied insurance coverage or fired from their jobs as health risks?
A genome project task force has attempted to answer just such questions and made recommendations to Congress. Some legislation has been written, but as yet no omnibus bill has been introduced by the Senate or House.
Ten years hence, no matter how complete the blueprint, many challenges will remain for geneticists, Gregory argued. Researchers will still have to figure out exactly how each gene works - and how genes interact with a person's behavior and living circumstances.
``Genes don't control everything,'' she said. ``There's an interplay between environment and heredity. You can't just reduce a person to a set of genes.''
The Human Genome Project is overseen jointly by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. Roughly 15 centers across the country, most at universities, share in different aspects of the genetics research.
Because the effort is underwritten by the federal government, it is subject to the same funding woes that currently plague all government agencies. As for seeing the genome venture through to its scheduled 2005 completion, Gregory said only that the project ``lives year to year, just like everything else.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Geneticist Paula Gregory
by CNB