Snips, variations in the DNA that make each individual unique, are the genetic determinants of health and disease. Because of machines that rapidly decode DNA, the chemical chain that embodies the genetic instructions, snips are at last becoming widely accessible. Genetic keys to what makes each person unique.
Snips promise to yield two troves of information, one past and one present.
They will help population geneticists reconstruct the size and timing of the early human migrations that peopled the globe. And they should enable medical geneticists to trace elusive links between genes and disease, particularly the common diseases to which many genes contribute. With the use of snips, pharmaceutical companies hope to match drugs more precisely to an individual's unique genetic makeup. The search for snips is an essential counterpart to the human genome project, the attempt to decode or sequence all three billion letters of human DNA in the next five to seven years. The human genome project largely ignores the variations in DNA that make each person unique.