WASHINGTON, D.C., MAR 31,2000 (ZENIT.org).- The Human Genome Project    

 announced Friday that 2/3 of the base pairs of the human DNA script have

 already been mapped. They further predict that by June, a working draft

 of 90% of the genome (with 99.9% accuracy) will be completed.

 Researchers from around the world, mostly working for publicly funded

 projects in the U.S. and Great Britain, are inputing their results into

 an Internet database, making them available free of charge to all

 scientists.

 This announcement is an attempt to beat private commercial enterprises,

 which are working on this same objective, but want to patent the

 information. The U.S. government's GenBank site, containing the known

 part of the genome, can be consulted freely at

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ , while the Human Genome Project homepage

 is located at http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/ .

 The genome is the set of genetic material characteristic of our species,

 located in the interior of cells. Its de-codification will fill in

 important holes in the development of therapies for the principal

 illness that affect us.

 Herein, precisely, is the great economic interest of private

 researchers. These companies hope to patent genetic data of therapeutic

 potential, so that scientists and laboratories wishing to study them

 will have to pay for the service.

 In all, there are some three billion "letters" constituting the genetic

 instruction book of humans, each letter representing a base pair in a

 DNA chain. The two millionth base pair was input into the system by the

 Wellcome Trust's Sanger Centre in Great Britain. The "letter" was a "T,"

 the abbreviation for thymine, one of the four chemicals or bases that

 make up DNA. The 2,178,076,000 unique base pairs now in GenBank have

 also been mapped to their locations on the 24 pairs of human

 chromosomes.

 Private Competition

 The genome race is led by Celera Genomics. Its president, U.S.

 geneticist Craig Venter, announced that his version of the data will be

 published at the end of the summer. If his statements are credible, his

 work is more advanced than that of the Human Genome Project, but he

 prefers to delay its publication in order to present the data in a more

 organized manner than his rivals.

 Progress in Project

 The total cost to produce June's working draft of the Human Genome

 Project stands at $250 million. The final version will be ready by 2003,

 according to the project's sources. Just four months ago, the project

 reached the 1 billion base pair milestone. The long delay for the final

 product is caused by extensive testing for accuracy. The two billion

 base pairs now mapped by the project actually represent fifteen billion

 base pairs mapped out by various researchers. Each approved pair has

 been confirmed by at least four experiments. The final project will have

 each area confirmed at least eight times.

 "It's good news that we're moving so fast but it's even better news that

 researchers throughout the world are using this data now to investigate

 the genetic underpinnings of health and diseases ranging from

 Alzheimer's to diabetes," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH's

 National Human Genome Research Institute, in a speech Friday at the BIO

 2000 annual international biotechnology conference in Boston.

 Freely Available to All

 Free access to this information was recently reinforced in statements by

 U.S. President Bill Clinton, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

 Clinton told scientists on March 14, the United States pledges "to lead

 a global effort to make the raw data from DNA sequencing available to

 scientists everywhere, to benefit people everywhere. To this end, I am

 pleased to announce a ground-breaking agreement between the United

 States and the United Kingdom, one which I reconfirmed just a few hours

 ago in a conversation with Prime Minister Blair."

 "This agreement says in the strongest possible terms our genome, the

 book in which all human life is written, belongs to every member of the

 human race," asserted the U.S. President. "Already the Human Genome

 Project, funded by the United States and the United Kingdom, requires

 its grant recipients to make the sequences they discover publicly

 available within 24 hours. I urge all other nations, scientists and

 corporations to adopt this policy and honor its spirit. We must ensure

 that the profits of human genome research are measured not in dollars,

 but in the betterment of human life."

 To their voices were added those of several of the highest scientific

 academic authorities. The statements caused a drop in the stock value of

 bio-technological firms.

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