Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome Program Vol. Online Online Bioinformatics Newsletters Recent Publications, Resources Funding Federal Technol. This article was originally written for and will appear in the online magazine TNTY Futures .
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In this article, the authors speculate about the possible future changes in medicial practice resulting from genome research. The first phase of the ambitious international effort to determine the entire sequence of the human chromosome set is virtually complete. Human Genome Project scientists plan to finish the human sequence by 2003, along with a database of the most common sequence variations that distinguish one person from another. This knowledge base, freely available to any interested person over the Internet, will revolutionize biology and medicine. Only time will prove the accuracy of the following predictions, but here is a list of some effects we might expect in 2020.