Celera, a leading pharmaceutical company, announced on May 20th, that, within a couple of weeks, it will have completed sequencing the human genome, a monumental task which has taken a lot of time and money. They estimate however, that 95% of the letters that the company has been sequencing for four years are "junk DNA," meaning it has no significance at all. The next step in understanding life functions is discovering where functional genes begin and end.

     In the journal, "Nature", scientists reported that they had finished decoding DNA chromosome 21 (there are 23 chromosomes in humans). Chromosome 21 is linked to, among other things, Down Syndrome. In Down syndrome, victims somehow acquire a third copy of the chromosome, whereas most people have just two. But it is not yet clear exactly which of the 225 or so genes on chromosome 21 triggers the scores of physical and cognitive symptoms typical of the syndrome--or whether it's simply DNA overload from having an extra chromosome.

     Another company, Doubletwist, Inc. said it had used data from the Public Genome Project to pinpoint 65,000 individual genes, out of the 100,000 or so in each human cell. Using a Sun Microsystems supercomputer, the company has taken raw data downloaded from the Public Project's growing online database, and put them through a computational wringer.