The reference sequence of Homo sapiens has not, in and of itself, revealed very many medical insights. That isn’t wrong – it has already brought new approaches to diagnosis and drug design that are changing the way many diseases, particularly cancer, are managed – but its real significance is subtler. The Human Genome Project is often described as a transformative moment in medical science, which is ushering in a new era of healthcare. The worth of these projects – many of them funded by the Wellcome Trust – lie not so much in the triumph of clever thinking, but in the clever thinking they would facilitate. Ten years now after the first draft of the 3 billion DNA letters that make up our species’s genetic code was published, the LMB motto still captures something fundamentally important, both about that remarkable achievement and about many of the ‘big science’ genomic initiatives that have followed it. It was to be an inspiration for his pivotal role in the sequencing of the human genome. If a lack of data was preventing good thoughts from flourishing, somebody would have to go out and remedy that. Yet it could also be interpreted another way. The dictum served as an admonition against hubris, a reminder to the LMB’s supremely bright theorists never to get too carried away with an unsupported hypothesis. "There is no point," it runs, "wasting good thoughts on bad data." Sir John Sulston, one of those Nobel Laureates, attributes it to another: the great Francis Crick. Īt the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge in the 1980s, scientists liked to repeat a saying that encapsulated the approach to research that has brought its alumni 14 Nobel Prizes. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on.
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