20 years after the human genome was first sequenced, dangerous gene myths abound

Twenty years ago, the science journal Nature published the first draft of the human genome: the sequence of chemical “letters” on the gene-bearing DNA of our chromosomes. The Human Genome Project (HGP) had laboured for a decade to read this coded information. In a White House press conference in 2000, Francis Collins, who led the project as director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, waxed biblical, calling the human genome “our own instruction book, previously known only to God”.

The HGP has huge potential benefits for medicine and our understanding of human diversity and origins. But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age.

So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read “nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being” – the “book of instructions” that “determine our particular traits”. A genome, says the institute, “contains all of the information needed to...