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Article: Human Genome Project
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
HUMAN GENOME PROJECT.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) is an ambitious international effort to understand the hereditary instructions that make each human being unique. Its original goal was to locate the 100,000 or so human genes and read the entire genetic script
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all three billion bits of information
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by the year 2005, although technological advances moved up the expected completion date to 2003 and allowed the project to release a "working draft" of the human genome sequence in June 2000.
Launched in 1990, the project is supported in the United States by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. The HGP expects to identify the ...