Ahead of schedule and under budget: The Genome Project passes its fifth birthday

摘要

Included in this issue of the Proceedings are five articles describing progress in total genome analysis of five higher eu-karyotes. Collections of reviews and discussions of this sort are a new feature of the Proceedings and are intended to provide a broader perspective of a particular field than could be obtained in a single review. The choice of the Genome Project as a topic for such a set of reviews is timely, as the Project officially reached its fifth birthday in the United States on October 1,1995. Discussions about the wisdom and feasibility of undertaking to map and sequence all of the chromosomes of Homo sapiens began in the mid-1980s and led to appropriately intense scientific debate before his international effort coalesced in 1990.