When a couple decides to have a child, they  roll the dice as to what physical and personal traits that child will have. They have only their genes to draw upon for what is in essence a random process of creating a child. There is no way to know how tall the child will be, his or her hair color, his or her eye color, his or her susceptibility to certain diseases, his or her intelligence, his or her athletic ability, and so on.

In the future, a few decades at most, this random aspect of child begetting may become a thing of the past. Thanks to the new science of biotechnology, people may  be able to choose physical and personal traits of a child much like people choose options on a new car. These traits would not only be the somewhat frivolous like whether the child will be blond or brunette, tall or short, but whether he or she is likely to be born with Down's syndrome, or get some kind of cancer later in life. The implications are profound.

The Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project was a 13 year long effort, which was concluded in the year 2003, to discover all the estimated 20,000-25,000 human genes and make them accessible for further biological study. The project was sponsored by the DOE Human Genome Program and the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), with input from researchers from around the world.

Much more research is necessary. The new challenge will be to use this vast reservoir of data to explore how DNA and proteins work with each other and the environment to create complex, dynamic living systems. While researchers know the positions of some genes that control our medical traits, they don't know the exact gene sequence. Other genes have been located but their functions are unknown, and still others remain entirely elusive. The point of genome research is to locate the genes and to learn what they actually do.