Viewpoint: The ‘post genomic era’ reveals nothing less than a new biology. We just don’t know how to talk about it

The genome sequence reveals the order in which the chemical building blocks (of which there are four distinct types) that make up our DNA are arranged along the molecule’s double-helical strands. Our genomes each have around 3 billion  of these ‘letters’; reading them all is a tremendous challenge, but the Human Genome Project (HGP) transformed genome sequencing within the space of a couple of decades from a very slow and expensive procedure into something you can get done by mail order for the price of a meal for two. Since that first sequence was unveiled in 2000, hundreds of thousands of human genomes have now been decoded, giving an indication of the person-to-person variation in sequence. This information has provided a vital resource for biomedicine, enabling us, for example, to identify which parts of the genome correlate with which diseases and traits. And all that investment in gene-sequencing technology was more than justified merely by its use for studying and tracking the SARS-CoV-2  virus during the COVID-19  pandemic.

Nonetheless, as with the Apollo Moon landings – with which the HGP has been routinely compared – the decades that followed the initial triumph have seemed something of an anticlimax. For all its practical value, sequencing in itself offers little advance in understanding how the genome – or life itself – works. As the veteran molecular biologist Sydney Brenner wrote in 2010, the comparison with the Apollo programme turns out to be ‘literally correct’:

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