The part that squicked me was where he called the idea of using gene sequencing to see if your kid might have a horrible life destroying defect before they are more than a few cells "disturbing", and bashed companies that help people find out whether they might be predisposed to cancer and shit.

Because, I dunno, it was "God's Will" for you to raise a child that has two heads or is so messed up that they will never run and play and will be in hellish pain for their entire existence, and aborting something like that is just awful, not compassionate. Because society NEEDS more people who are miserable and fucked up and cannot really contribute.

Holy fuckballs.

Can we please take control of evolution and prevent morons like that doucecanoe from breeding?

Well said, well said.

That whole article could have been titled "But They Promised Us Flying Cars!" Whine, whine. Yeah, science hasn't delivered on everything they've promised, but the very nature of science is that what is "possible" doesn't always mesh with what "is." Science says "this is what we expect, but we won't know for sure until we test it." More often than not, the benefits of a discovery are vastly different from what they expected to gain from the work.

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"Sorry, but this shows clearly that Mr Thomsen has very little clue about the results or the meaning of HGP. Just the little telltale sign of him dismissing the project because it produced "2% protein-coding genes but 98% junk" shows that he didn't even care to look deeper into the matter than the naive meaning of the word "junk". If he had, he'd find out that it didn't take HGP to find out that 80% to 99% of mammalian DNA is noncoding (that has been discovered much earlier), and perhaps even that the term "junk DNA" is a colloquailism for noncoding sequences which include (among "real" junk like defunct genes and pseudogenes and replicating sequences) all the regulatory stuff that makes up the developmental and physiological programming. Yes, the difference between us and chimps is not in the proteins, it's in the regulatory network. Your point, Mr Thomsen?

Perhaps the greatest thing to come out from HGP was not the economical gain, and not measuring the evolutionary distance between chimps and humans, and not even the easy genetic marker diagnostics used everywhere nowadays. It was the drastic improvement and miniaturization of DNA sequencing technology. At the roots of HGP, sequencing had to be done practically with manual labor, slowly and painfully. At the end of HGP, automatic sequencers had been churning away at clockwork rhythm, orders of magnitude faster and cheaper. Roll a few short years to now, and you'll see tabletop devices routinely sequencing massive numbers of mixed DNA spans in a day without human intervention, reassembling them into genomes and detecting markers as needed.

The automated sequencer which HGP created demand for and perfected has changed the way we do so many things, I cannot count them. Sequencing a species genome has turned from an impossible pipe dream into a routine, relatively cheap thing done thousands of times by now. Instead of endless arguing about phenotypes, the evolutionary biologist uses differences in sequenced genes to measure relative distance and descent pattern between many species. Instead of doing month-long species surveys, an ecologist puts a raw sample through sequencer and detects DNA markers of the animals who live in the area. Instead of painstakingly culturing water samples (and failing to detect 90% of microbes that don't grow in his substrate), microbiologist puts the water drop through the sequencer and sees the markers for everything that lives there, routinely discovering new species in the process. Pharmaceutical worker uses sequences to produce accurate disease tests. Experimental biologist uses sequencers to produce instant blockers or activators for genes, for studying what these genes do. That latter is something that Mr Thomsen claims didn't happen as a result of HGP.
Perhaps next time Mr Thomsen should spend less time putting on his pundit turban, and more time studying popular science articles on the field he decides to grace with his sage opinion. There's a lot to be learned even in such light reading, and perhaps knowledge isn't power for everybody, but a little knowledge is very good for not making a fool out of oneself."