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So similar, yet so different

Nature volume 449, pages 762–763 (2007)Cite this article

Tiny pieces of the genome can already explain many human characteristics. Erika Check Hayden looks at what they might reveal in the future.

In his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton chose to emphasize something he had recently heard from a genome researcher: that humans are all, irrespective of race, 99.9% the same genetically. "Modern science," he told his country's legislators, "has confirmed what ancient faiths have always taught: the most important fact of life is our common humanity." Seven years on, and four years after the final publication of the sequences from the Human Genome Project, new technologies and larger data sets are allowing genome biologists to answer a conundrum embodied in that unity-inspiring percentage: if our DNA is so similar, why do we seem different in so many ways?

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Authors
  1. Erika Check Hayden
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Additional information

See http://tinyurl.com/3xw89t for an interview with Luca Cavalli-Sforza about his Italian Genome Project and geographic genetic diversity.

See also Editorial, page 755, and Books & Arts, page 785.

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NPG Omics Gateway

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HapMap home page

Sanger Center Copy Number Variation Project

Eichler Lab structural variation database

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Check Hayden, E. So similar, yet so different. Nature 449, 762–763 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/449762a

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