Publish Date: July 3, 2000
Cover Story: The Race Is Over
How TIME Covered the News:
“After more than a decade of dreaming, planning and heroic number crunching, both groups have deciphered essentially all the 3.1 billion biochemical “letters” of human DNA, the coded instructions for building and operating a fully functional human. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this achievement. Armed with the genetic code, scientists can now start teasing out the secrets of human health and disease at the molecular level–secrets that will lead at the very least to a revolution in diagnosing and treating everything from Alzheimer’s to heart disease to cancer, and more. In a matter of decades, the world of medicine will be utterly transformed, and history books will mark this week as the ceremonial start of the genomic era.”