If there's one animal which genetics has really made famous, it's Dolly the ewe. While the world went ga-ga over this success of genetics, most people forgot about the human genome. A genome, in simple-speak, is all the DNA in an organism, including its genes.
Genes carry information for making all the proteins required by organisms.
These proteins, in turn, determine, among other things, how the organism looks, how well its body metabolises food or fights infection, and sometimes even how it behaves. The decoding of the entire human genome in June Y2K by a team of five at Celera Genomics in the US might have spawned the general idea that genomics has reached its end, but scientists maintain that the truth is diametrically different. Doctors will be able to alert patients that they are susceptible to certain diseases. Once scientists discover which particular change in DNA sequence can cause disease, healthy people can be tested to see whether they risk developing these conditions.