Last week, I wrote about the potential of personalized medicine, and I briefly mentioned the role of genetic sequencing and the Human Genome Project (HGP) in making personalized medicine possible. This week, I want to delve a little deeper into what exactly goes into sequencing a genome. The HGP, which took 13 years to complete, was performed using a process known as Sanger sequencing. Sanger sequencing, invented in 1977 by Fred Sanger, is a laborious and costly process of sequencing. In the HGP, relatively tiny fragments of the human genome were sequenced multiple times and aligned together, piece by piece,…
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