Eric Lander, a Princeton U. alumnus and principal leader of the Human Genome Project, described the genetic mapping process, as well as developments that have occurred since the project’s completion, to a packed crowd at his alma mater on Monday night.
“I really, really want to give you a sense of the discoveries, and a feeling and pace of what’s going on with respect to the genome project,” Lander said, in an attempt to share “what’s really going on … what excites us as scientists,” rather than presenting “the cartoon version.”
Lander called the current era one of the most remarkable times in any scientific field.
“Once in the history of every scientific discipline you get to see the whole — you have fragmentary pieces, but very rarely do you get to see the whole,” he said, citing the discovery that the world was round and the completion of the periodic table as parallel revolutions in geography and chemistry, respectively.
“We can’t imagine what it would be like to learn chemistry without knowing the periodic table,” he explained. “That’s what’s happening in biology right now.”
Lander said that the genome project provides far more questions than answers.
“We need to be able to know how to read it to know which genes turn on what, which genes code for proteins … We need to know not just the gene sequence in general, but all the variation in the human population,” he said.
But Lander said that the speed at which the field has advanced in recent years indicates that, in the near future, “we won’t be able to imagine what it was like to live in the 1980s, when molecular biologists went out into the jungles in search of genes” — much like we cannot imagine living in a world without an accurate map.
Lander also acknowledged the contributions to the field by David Botstein, director of the University’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, noting that Botstein’s method for mapping genes enabled the Human Genome Project.
“David … said we should make a genetic map so we can be systematic … a map from which finding the genes for any disease would be possible,” he explained.
In March, Lander and Botsein, along with Francis Collins, a leader of the Human Genome Project and the curent director of the National Institutes of Health, shared the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research for their work on genetics.
Lander noted that the Human Genome Project was the first organized project to make all information freely available to everyone.
The Human Genome Project “involved changes in technology; it involved changes in our culture — collaborations between different countries, 20 different centers — everyone working towards a common goal,” he said.
A surprise of the Human Genome Project was that the number of protein-coding genes was much fewer than anyone expected, Lander recalled. Scientists initially expected that there would be roughly 100,000 such genes, but the project revealed that only 21,000 protein-coding genes existed.
He also noted that “most of the evolution that distinguished [humans] has been in non-coding genes,” adding that only 10 percent of the human genome has changed over the course of human existence.
“The mutation rate is sufficiently slow that 5 percent goes back to when humans were in Africa, and only 5 percent since the human population has existed outside of Africa,” he explained.
“The real secret about the human genome is how many secrets there are left to discover,” Lander said.
Lander was appointed by President Obama as one of the three co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in December 2008.