Just to Know

At the time that the Human Genome Project was going on, many people knew that it was being oversold, writes Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life. (He adds that he wished he had a blog at the time so he could have given it his "Overselling Genomics Award.") And so, he's not surprised at the current "backlash" against the project — he rounds up some recent stories that say that the project hasn't lived up to its expectations. "The problem here is that the human genome project should never have been sold as a means to a series of practical ends. It should have been sold as a massive basic science project, much like going to the moon or building a giant linear accelerator," Eisen writes. "That is, the human genome project was, and still really is, about knowledge. It is about knowing ourselves."