"Medicine is dominated by the realization that aspects of the human condition are determined by the genes people have," he says. Genetic irregularities can be found at the root of most diseases, including genetic diseases, diabetes, and heart disease, Gilbert says.

Gilbert's lab was one of the first sequencing centers in the country, for his pioneering work, he was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

"Gilbert and I were at the early meetings before the project was started," says Assistant Professor of Genetics George M. Church, who is also involved in the project.

Both scientists received grants to conduct research in the project early on, he says.

The project is jointly funded by NIH, through the National Center for Human Genome Research, and by the Department of Energy. Contributions to the project have also been made by other countries such as England and Italy.

The current research initiative, begun last year, will proceed through three five-year plans until 2006.

The U.S. government is spending approximately $120 million per year on the project.

An NIH report stated, "The information generated by the human genome project is expected to be the source book for biomedical science in the 21st century and will be of immense benefit to the field of medicine."

Gilbert says, however, that although curing and preventing disease is the crux of medicine, scientists have other motivations to experiment in biology.

"We are interested in how living things work and how we work," he says. "The project is also creating a developmental research tool which can be used in the next century to understand biology."

The NIH report also described the project as trying to develop new technology for biological and biomedical research.

New Techniques

Gilbert heads a lab of scientists and technicians who are sequencing the genetic material of Micoplasma capricolum, a small species of bacteria.

This organism's genome consists of approximately one million base pairs of DNA. The bacteria is one of a group of "Model organisms" which are being sequenced along with the human genome to discover new techniques of DNA analysis as well as to acquire knowledge about the organism itself.

Gilbert's lab is working out the sequence for the bacterium and performing computer analyses to identify the genes.