Question

What do you think will be the short-term and long-term impacts of Human Genome Projects? What do you think will be the most significant benefits of the applications of genomics? What are the risk?

Answer 1

The first international Human Genome Project (HGP) started in the 1990s with the goal of determining the DNA sequence is first of its kind since then there have been new genome studies. Studying the human genome would help us identify how the human body works and evolves completely. Even though there's been much extensive research on human genomes, there are still whose function we are not aware of yet.

Short-term impact would include figuring out the function of so and so genes that would help in the immediate research involving the genes, enhanced knowledge of certain genes and their functions, based on which new theories can be made and explored. Other short-term effects might include risk assessment, identifying the causes of a genetic disorder caused by a gene, etc.

Long-term impact would be molecular medicine. Simply putting, HGP would help in better identification of diseases, development of drugs for genetic disorders, gene therapy, custom drugs, earlier detection, etc. Other non-medical impacts would be enhanced study about human evolution, forensics, bioarchaeology, bioprocessing,etc.  

The risks in HGP would include ethical issues, social and clinical issues. With the entire human genome deciphered the fairness of usage comes to question. It might be used for unethical and destructive purposes or invasion of privacy. Also when it comes to genetic disorder even though there's a genetic predeposit, there are several factors that affect the onset of a genetic disorder and HGP data might not be accurate in such cases and lead to misdiagnosing.