Psychiatric Genetics: Future and Prospects

When a completed draft emerged from The Human Genome Project in 2001 (1 ), the most ambitious biological enterprise ever undertaken yielded a prize of almost inestimable value: A map of the basepair (bp) sequence of the nearly 6-foot strand of DNA found in almost all of the body’s 100 trillion cells (2 –4 ). As President Clinton has stated, “Without a doubt, this is the most wondrous map ever created by mankind.” Data from that project will be generally available to the scientific community, permitting a wide variety of projects in several areas. Medical tests will be created to identify those at risk for a multitude of diseases, so that people will gain time to take preventative measures. Drugs designed on the basis of genetic information will provide more effective treatments, and genetic therapies that work directly at the site of a problematic gene will become increasingly available. Despite the enormous size of the DNA strand, it appears that humans possess the relatively small number of 30,000 genes; the remainder of the material presents the opportunity to document our evolutionary heritage with a degree of accuracy that was previously unimaginable.