Sub: The Human Genome Project is perhaps the greatest project of all time. Prof. Lantz reveals his methods of conduct, and the answer is surprising
By Avi Blizovsky
On May 31, 2007, the annual conference of the PMI - the Israeli Association for Project Management will be held. The main lecturer at the conference will be the head of the Human Genome Research Center at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Prof. Doron Lantz.
Without any doubt, the human genome project is one of the biggest projects that humanity has undertaken and which lasted over a decade, cost about 3 billion dollars and in many ways it is still ongoing. Prof. Lantz explains that this is a project that was carried out almost entirely democratically, without one body coordinating it and giving orders to others.
In a conversation with InformationWeek, Prof. Lantz says that the recognition that it is possible to read this huge "book" called the human genome, reached maturity in the 19s. "The DNA or the alphabet of the human genome was already discovered in the 1953th century but they did not know what it meant. The understanding that it is the genetic material that encodes the properties of living beings came in the 3s. In XNUMX, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA that allows copying the information in it and making many copies of it. It took another thirty years to grasp the power of DNA's meaning." Although a gigabyte of data is not considered a large amount in an era where every personal computer has tens of gigabytes, it is still hard to grasp that two copies of the genome, each of which contains XNUMX gigabytes of data, are found in every cell of our bodies. The cell is the most compressed information storage facility known to science."
"In the XNUMXs, the understanding permeated the scientific community that a seemingly far-fetched dream could be realized - that reading everything written in a person's (or any other creature's) DNA might be perfect within a few years, and thus the genome project was born. It can be said that everything we are is written in DNA. There is of course an influence of the environment, but the genetic load determines a lot."
However, beyond the scientific interest, the biggest challenge in the project is actually technological. But in contrast to the orderly way in which a project is defined according to the PMI, here it is a very large collection of small projects, each of which is managed separately, with the whole being confederated. Many genome centers are scattered all over the world, they all talk to each other, but none of them gives orders to the others and there is no one project manager. "
Was the project on schedule?
Prof. Lantz: "The human genome project was planned to last 15 years and ended after about 13 years. The project gradually gained momentum. It is a project whose infrastructure has been constantly evolving. The first seven years were devoted mainly to creating an infrastructure and developing equipment and software. All this to reach a situation where in the second half of the project he will work more efficiently.
When was it actually decided that the project was finished?
"Such projects never end. In 2001 we reached a situation where we very clearly saw the light at the end of the tunnel and then the politicians saw fit to officially announce its end. It ended when we received the DELIVRABLE - the text of the entire "average" genome of a group of humans. President Clinton held an impressive press conference, the scientists were interviewed and finally returned to the desk for another year. However, the project continues today, among other things, to answer questions that arose during the research. Today, for example, we are not satisfied with just looking for the common denominator between all human beings, but rather for the differences."
What is meant by?
"When it comes to 3 billion letters in the language of DNA, and the accepted estimate is that every two people differ by one letter out of a thousand, this figure means that there are three million differences in DNA between people. First, in the main project, we wanted to examine those 999 out of a thousand "letters" in each section that are common to all humans and distinguish them from other living creatures, therefore the scientists all over the world worked on many genome samples of all races. During the research, they began to understand that it is also important to look for the differences. Today it is one of the hot topics in science. The common form of differences is single letter changes. But only in recent weeks has a comprehensive review of another and interesting type of differences been published. This means that there are genes - pieces of information in the language of DNA, each of which encodes a protein - that in some people appear in one copy, while in others in two or more copies. By the way, regarding the cost at the time, it cost us a dollar to read every letter in the genome, hence the total cost of three billion dollars for the first genome. However, today technologies are being implemented in the world and even in Israel that are capable of reading an entire genome for a thousandth of the price, and they are talking realistically about a cost of a thousand dollars per genome within a few years. "
How did the work in the field go?
"Each team in the countries that contributed substantially to reading ("sequencing") the genome was given responsibility for deciphering a segment from another chromosome. The State of Israel at that stage had a mainly planning contribution, for example I was one of the "editors" of chromosome 17, and in this framework we participated in the sequencing of a fraction of a percent of the genome. The researchers around the world read the genome with the help of machines developed during the project. Those who wanted and were financially able to contribute more and decode more genome segments, raised funds and even set up hundreds of reading machines. This was the case in public genome centers in England and the USA, as well as in the American commercial company Celera. In general, the project was very planned at the local level - but very decentralized at the global level."
