The TV series Truth Will Out asked a panel of experts if mapping the human genome will bring forward a new era of medicine. These articles were originally published in July 2001.

Sara Abdulla is a science and arts journalist who works for the leading international journal of science Nature as the editor of their free popular daily webzine: Nature Science Update

Will the human genome revolutionise medicine? A road atlas helps the motorist travel more quickly and efficiently, find shortcuts and avoid dead ends. But every journey is still shaped — still limited — by car and road technology, weather and traffic conditions and the driver's skills and stamina. The phenomenal technological, creative and collaborative achievement that is the human genome sequence is the 21st century human biologists' road atlas.

Though still being finessed, already it is hastening scientists explorations of the molecular scenery of health and disease immeasurably. Already it is leading them to rich, fertile terrain they would not have crossed otherwise. But, like road trips, the speed and success of these odysseys into the heartlands of human cell biology do still depend upon other technical and social factors — computing power, chemical synthesis, drug delivery, clinical trials, funding politics and fashion, to name but a few.

Plus, just as the reality of a country is more than even the most detailed map can express, so the human body is much, much more than its genetic recipe. The body's complex functions emerge from a mind-boggling interplay of parameters, so numerous and mutable as to be — possibly — indescribable except as a whole, rather than as a sum of parts.

Finally, the human genome sequence is in some ways a far from finished map: great stretches are sketched in, but not yet labelled. It will be some years before all these regions — the genetic equivalent of 'here be dragons' — will be usefully charted.

So, yes, like any map, the human genome sequence could change the medical landscape — by dint of the sheer weight of intellectual traffic set to thunder down the avenues it lays bare.

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