After years of bitter rivalry, Francis Collins, then the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute and Craig Venter together made the announcement from the East Room of the White House.
Then-president Bill Clinton predicted that the feat, which cost billions of dollars and took more than a decade, would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.”
We’re clearly not there yet. So what exactly have we gained from knowing the sequence of 3 billion base pairs?
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Young mouse models of fragile X syndrome show a significant lag in the development of synapses, the connections between neurons, according to a study published in February in Neuron.
There are several short periods during development in which our brains are ‘plastic’ — meaning that neuronal connections appear and disappear depending on how much they are used.
Over the past couple of years, study after study has found specific DNA deletions and duplications, called copy number variations (CNVs), that independently 
Brian Dugan, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackles, shuffled to the door of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, accompanied by four sheriff deputies. It was the first time that Dugan, 52, had been anywhere near a city in 20 years. Serving two life sentences for a pair of murders he had committed in the 1980s, he was now facing the prospect of the death penalty for an earlier killing.
A new technique can simultaneously sequence DNA and pinpoint some of the chemical modifications that turn genes on or off, according to a report published 9 May in Nature Methods.
