Future Cures

The 13-year-long human genome project whose aim was to identify all the 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA and determine the sequences of some three billion chemical base pairs that constitute it, ended successfully in 2003. In the five years since then it has enabled medical researchers to make some pretty spectacular new health breakthroughs, including finding links between genetics and a number of conditions like heart attack, cancer, multiple sclerosis and gallstones.