THANKS to the shenanigans in Florida, 2000 will always be synonymous with
political farce. But it will also be remembered as the year something rather
more fundamental captured the world’s imagination: the human genome.
Bill Clinton hailed that very long sequence of four different letters, each
representing a nucleotide base, as “the most wondrous map ever produced” when he
unveiled it on 26 June. The media lapped it up, casting the “book of life” as a
genetic oracle heralding undreamed-of treatments for incurable diseases.
But as New Scientist said at the time, this was just “the end of the
beginning”.…
