LONDON – Fifty-one years ago, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, and Francis Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of DNA’s structure – a breakthrough that heralded the age of the gene. Since then, the field of genetics has advanced significantly, particularly as a result of the global Human Genome Project, which in 2003 identified all of the roughly 23,000 genes and three billion chemical base pairs in human DNA in order to screen for many rare diseases.
伦敦—51年前，詹姆斯·沃森、莫里斯·威尔金斯和弗朗西斯·克里克因发现DNA结构而被授予诺贝尔医学奖，他们的发现开启了基因时代。至此以后，遗传学获得了极大的进步，特别受到了人类基因组计划的推动，2003年，该计划识别了人类DNA的所有23000个左右的基因和30亿化学碱基对，其目的是绘制大量罕见疾病的图谱。