http://www.telegraphindia.com/
RACE IS IN MIND, NOT IN GENES
K. P. NAYAR
Washington, Feb. 11:
Ten years after two rival teams of scientists on both sides of the
Atlantic began interpreting DNA-encoded instructions that make the human
being, they have come up with the startling finding that race is not a
scientific concept.
The teams have concluded that men provide a greater force for
evolutionary change than women; but they also promote disease.
Scientists across the world are gasping in disbelief at the finding by
both teams, prematurely released last night, that human beings have
around 35,000 genes, not very much more than a fruit fly or a worm.
Previous research had established that some small flowering plants have
about 25,000 genes and tiny worms as much as 19,000.
The teams have, however, not reasoned out why human beings are more
complex that worms or flies if they have so few genes.
The significance of last night’s findings, though, is that it will help
find genes that promote disease and enable the discovery of better
medicines and more scientific treatment.
The findings are also expected to help in better evaluation of
environmental hazards and the study of human migration.
After researching on three women and two men — white, black, Chinese and
Hispanic — the research found very little differences among them. This
led to the conclusion that race has no genetic basis.
The two teams were under the arclights last year when they deciphered
letters of the DNA code — the genome with three billion letters — which
reveals fundamental information of how the human body functions.
But the rival teams, one in Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, and
another a consortium of academic institutions across Europe, China and
Japan, are highly critical of each other’s approach.
Last year, then US president Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister
Tony Blair brought the rival groups of scientists together at the White
House for a truce.
They agreed at this meeting on a joint announcement at the end of their
research and a joint publication of their findings.
That announcement was to have been have been made tomorrow here and in
Europe at two separate press conferences, but The Observer of London
ignored the embargo and broke the story this weekend.
The scientists, therefore, prematurely released their conclusions last
night.
One of the teams is led by Dr J Craig Venter, president of Celera
Genomics in Rockville, Maryland.
The international consortium is funded by America’s National Institutes
of Health and the Wellcome Trust of London. Its spokesman is Dr Eric
Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachussets.
Despite the truce arranged at the White House, each team tried to
prevent the other from publishing findings in scientific journals and
speaking time at tomorrow’s joint press conference was to have been very
strictly apportioned, to the minute.
The consortium’s report said about their discovery:
“In principle, the string of genetic bits holds long-sought secrets of
human development, physiology and medicine”. It also conceded: “In
practice, our ability to transform such knowledge into understanding
remains woefully inadequate”.
Dr. Venter, writing for his team, said the 10-year research has been
“mentally exhausting, in part because we are not mentally equipped to
absorb all this. We feel like midgets describing the universe and we
can’t comprehend it all”.
Dr Harold Varmus, head of the internationally known Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Centre in New York compared the findings to viewing the earth
from the moon. “It is pretty thrilling”, he said.
"The greatest trick that the devil played was to convince that he doesn’t exist"movie-Usual Suspect