Desafiando a Nomenklatura Científica: Genoma humano: a vida é muito mais complicada do que os cientistas imaginavam e não sabiam

quinta-feira, abril 01, 2010

Published online 31 March 2010 | Nature 464, 664-667 (2010) | doi:10.1038/464664a

News Feature
Human genome at ten: Life is complicated

The more biologists look, the more complexity there seems to be. Erika Check Hayden asks if there's a way to make life simpler.

Erika Check Hayden

Not that long ago, biology was considered by many to be a simple science, a pursuit of expedition, observation and experimentation. At the dawn of the twentieth century, while Albert Einstein and Max Planck were writing mathematical equations that distilled the fundamental physics of the Universe, a biologist was winning the Nobel prize for describing how to make dogs drool on command.

The molecular revolution that dawned with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 changed all that, making biology more quantitative and respectable, and promising to unravel the mysteries behind everything from evolution to disease origins. The human genome sequence, drafted ten years ago, promised to go even further, helping scientists trace ancestry, decipher the marks of evolution and find the molecular underpinnings of disease, guiding the way to more accurate diagnosis and targeted, personalized treatments. The genome promised to lay bare the blueprint of human biology.

That hasn't happened, of course, at least not yet. In some respects, sequencing has provided clarification. Before the Human Genome Project began, biologists guessed that the genome could contain as many as 100,000 genes that code for proteins. The true number, it turns out, is closer to 21,000, and biologists now know what many of those genes are. But at the same time, the genome sequence did what biological discoveries have done for decades. It opened the door to a vast labyrinth of new questions.

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