Thank you, Maggie, for this:
http://www.lineone.net/cgi-bin/loadcontent.pl?page=/cgi-bin/drecgi/express/00/05/06/news/n1920dna-d.html
LIVING LEGEND: Even the mythical unicorn could be brought to life
CANCER will be consigned to the history books, meat will grow on trees and mythical beasts such as the unicorn could come to life, all within the next few decades, according to Britain's leading genetics scientist.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Express, Dr John Sulston, director of the Sanger Genome Centre outside Cambridge, predicts that humanity will be soon be able to take over the reins of evolution itself, creating new animals and plants to order - and perhaps even reviving some long-dead species.
The Sanger Centre is the British powerhouse of the Human Genome Project, the massive multi-billion dollar British-American-Japanese effort to unravel the genetic code - the instruction manual for Homo Sapiens.
Conceived in the 1980s, the HGP was supposed to finish its work sequencing the three billion letters of our genetic code by 2010. Instead, thanks to massive improvements in computing technology the genome, the first draft of the "book of life", will be finished in just a few weeks.
Dr Sulston said that once every one of the 100,000 genes is known, things like heart disease and cancer will soon be a thing of the past. "I suspect that scientists will be able to use our data to fix cancer in the next decade or so," he said. "We will soon have handles on heart disease, too."
But the consequences of the "project of the millennium" stand to be far more bizarre than simply conquering diseases. Now the technology is in place, the genomes of dozens of other species will be deciphered in the next few years. Chimpanzees, fish, cats and mice will all be sequenced by 2010. By comparing the genomes of different animals - a technique called comparative genomics - biologists will be quickly able to work out which genes do what. What makes a human cleverer than a chimp, for example, or what are the key genes for size, shape or colour.
This work will not be carried out by the HGP, but by hundreds of scientists all over the world using data released on to the Internet by the Sanger Centre and its sister institutions in the States and Japan.
Using the same technology already used to create GM plants, DNA could then be "cut and spliced" into the genomes of any species - creating "designer animals" with any properties that you want. "You can actually turn one organism into another by genetic engineering. You can accelerate evolution," Dr Sulston predicts. "In this century we will be able to build animals to order. We can create the perfect farm animal, with no brain, no feelings. With no sentience you have no cruelty. The vegetarians could eat meat with a clear conscience."
Using comparative gen-omics, he says, scientists could effectively turn animals into plants. "If you want pork, then create a pig with no head and no legs, just a slab of meat growing on a farm, fed with nutrients," he said.
"Efficient and totally humane. You could even put plant genes in and get it to photosynthesise. Or what about a headless turkey?" Once the genes that govern muscle and protein production in vertebrates are known, it will be possible to insert them into plants to get them to grow animal protein. "I think it will become rather fashionable," said Dr Sulston.
"The chattering classes will lap up the new designer foods. Once the products get really exciting the controversy over genetic modification will disappear."
The Sanger Centre, built and run by the Wellcome Trust, is an extraordinary institution, perhaps nothing quite like it exists anywhere else on Earth.
Inside, the brushed aluminium buildings make the bridge of the Starship Enterprise look like a Morris Minor. Four huge machines automatically select bacterial cultures that have had inserted unique strands of human DNA.
Trays of culture and banks of needles whizz around the culture chambers, often moving too fast for the eye to follow. "When I started doing this we did it by hand, using a sterile platinum loop and a Petri dish," said Don Powell, the Sanger Centre's information officer.
Snippets of the genome are inserted into simple bacteria, and these are grown in colonies of billions of individuals.
Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of "designer" plants and animals. Greenpeace food campaigner Dr Doug Parr said the new technology would leave a lot of people feeling queasy.
"Should we welcome this?" he said. "This is a moral issue rather than one about risks. Even if you can do these things safely, you have to ask, is this what we want to do? This is redefining our relationship with the natural world, and there is no easy answer to that."
In Germany, Dr Janni Nussleim-Volhart is sequencing the genetic code of the zebrafish, an important animal as it is a relatively simple vertebrate that grows rapidly with a transparent body that can easily be studied. Knowing the key genes that build a vertebrate's body will alow scientists to "evolve" more or less any animal they choose.
Dr Sulston said: "You could build a dragon, why not? Or a unicorn. Just find the genes that make a narwhal (a whale with a long horn on its snout) and splice them into a horse. You could even compare the genomes of birds and living reptiles, find out the common sequences, and build a dinosaur. All this will be possible if people choose to do it."
AMAZING RESULTS ALREADY FIGHTING DISEASE
Even before it is finished, the Human Genome Project has paid dividends.
One of this country's eminent geneticists is using results coming from the HGP to help combat muscular and nervous system disorders.
She says knowledge gleaned from unravelling human DNA will enable drugs to be developed that will compensate for defects and effectively treat these devastating diseases.
Professor Kay Davies of the Department of Human Anatomy and Human Genetics at the University of Oxford is studying Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), one of 20 different types of muscular dystrophy which affects about one in 3,000 boys.
DMD, which occurs in males only, is caused by a lack of dystrophin protein, which joins the inside of muscle fibres to the outside. The result of the defect is that the body's muscles gradually waste away and affected individuals lose their ability to walk.
The dystrophin gene is located on the X chromosome, of which women have a pair, and men only one. This means that boys who inherit the disease will do so from a mother who carries one copy of the defective gene.
Because it is one of the largest of all known genes, using gene therapy to introduce it into all affected muscle cells, including those in the heart, is likely to be problematic.
Her group is identifying DNA sequences in the utrophin gene using data flooding out of the Human Genome Project. "we are now piecing together these sequences to reproduce the entire regulatory region of the utrophin gene," said Professor Davies.
Armed with this knowledge, her team are pursuing two possible treatment options. The first involves gene therapy.
Here, the group plans to introduce the gene into viruses that will infect the muscle cell and carry the utrophin gene with it. The other approach the team is actively pursuing aims to identify drugs that increase utrophins production.
� Express Newspapers, 2000