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Human Gene Group Project More Important Than Space Flight
The human gene group project (hggp) is more significant than the Apollo Space Project, according to an expert. Compared to the Manhattan atomic bomb project and the Apollo space project, hggp is considered the most important and urgent, Yang Minghuan, the chief scientist for the China human gene group, stated at the West Lake Exposition for 2000 in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province.
Launched in 1990 by the United States including other five participants -- Japan, Britain, France, Germany and China, hggp is designed to map out the sequence of all three billion nucleotide pairs, which will help decode the structures and functions of the 100,000 genes in the human body and thus reveal a large amount of information on human genes. Yang, 48, and his colleagues deciphered the chromosomes that make the human forearms, accounting for one percent of the total work. Now China is one of the top four countries in the world in terms of gene sequencing capacity, he said. Yang added that the gene group center under the genetic research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with which he works, is the seventh largest human gene research center in the world.
Yang said that scientists will complete the whole sequencing draft of human gene in June next year. The human gene research will be immeasurably significant to solving the riddles in various fields such as diseases, the lot of man -- birth and old age, sickness and death, and medicine industry, agriculture and livestock breeding as well. On the basis of DNA sequencing, the complete draft of human genome will usher human beings into a new era of bio-science and bio-technology.
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