Scientists Launch Moonshot to Build an Entire Human Genome From Scratch
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Summary
The Wellcome Trust, a major medical charity, will give £10m ($13.6m) towards a synthetic human genome project it has kickstart-ed.
While the Human Genome Project mapped human DNA, this project will attempt to build it from scratch, and is likely to take decades to achieve its goal.
Once complete, it is expected to lead to major breakthroughs in genetics.
However, there are ethical concerns over building artificial human genomes, for example, what stops synthetic DNA being used to create enhanced humans or bioweapons?
As part of the project, social science is being built in to study these ethical concerns, such as the fact that current genomic research predominantly focuses on people of European ancestry.
