This is why we need to be engaged as a people in the Human Genome Project and any other project that demands so many resources from all of us. Our engagement can help keep everybody honest and our presence at the table can keep our issues on the research and policy agenda. Finally, we should realize that even highly touted mega projects like the Human Genome Project can make omissions and can shift directions. For years, Dr. Dunston has lobbied our colleagues in both the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Human Genome Project to include African American sequences in their baseline databases. These efforts were not successful at this level, but they did secure the investment, at Howard University, of a National Genome Center that promises to make our issues and our concerns a priority.
Human variation is a paradox.
We are diverse, but often not in the ways that we imagine. There is fundamental diversity within our subspecies, but there is also overwhelming essential unity. All life on this planet is interconnected and shows the signature of a single Creator God. Our task in the 21 st century will be to try to understand what both the diversity and similarity of each of us means. We will need the new technological tools of functional genomics and interaction biology but we will also nee fresh perspectives.