TRANSLATING THE GENETIC LIBRARY - THE GOALS, METHODS, AND APPLICATIONS OF THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

The information produced by the Human Genome Project will have profoun d effects on the medical community, biotechnology companies, research scientists, and others. The ultimate goal of the project is to locate the approximately 100,000 genes that contain the instructions for crea ting a human being. Once these genes are found, they can be studied to increase understanding of their role in health and disease. Informati on about the location of a gene, its function, and its connection to d isease will be stored in a variety of computer databases. Medical libr arians can help assure that this information reaches the people who ne ed it. To aid in this effort, this paper provides an introduction to t he Human Genome Project: its goals, examples of methods used to achiev e these goals, the types of information produced, and examples of how this information can be used in medicine and basic research. Because r apid research progress makes it difficult to predict the exact course of the project, this paper will focus on the first five years, 1990-19 95.