Human genome at ten: Life is complicated

The genome promised to lay bare the blueprint of human biology. That hasn't happened, of course, at least not yet. "It seems like we're climbing a mountain that keeps getting higher and higher," says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at Berkeley Lab. "The more we know, the more we realize there is to know." "It's people who complicate things," says Randy Schekman, a cell and molecular biologist at Berkeley Lab. "I've seen enough scientists to know that some people are simplifiers and others are dividers." Mina Bissell, a cancer researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, says that during the Human Genome Project, she was driven to despair by predictions that all the mysteries would be solved. "Famous people would get up and say, 'We will understand everything after this'," she says. "Biology is complex, and that is part of its beauty." More>