What can medicine learn from the human DNA sequence?

The cooperation of biochemistry with clinical medicine consists of two overlapping temporal phases. Phase 1 of the cooperation, which still is not finished, is characterized by joint work on the pathogenesis and diagnostics of systemic metabolic diseases, whereas in phase 2 the cooperation on tissue and cell specific as well as on molecular diseases is prevailing. It is suggested that the content of cooperation between the two disciplines will profoundly change. Biochemistry will strongly be occupied to relate the thousands of protein coding genes to the structure and function of the encoded proteins, and medicine will be concerned in finding new protein markers for diagnostics, to identify novel drug targets, and to investigate, for example, the proteomes of the variety of tumors to aid tumor classification, to mention only a few areas of interest which medicine will have in the progress of human genome research. The review summarizes the recent achievements in sequencing the human DNA as published in February 2001 by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and Celera Genomics and discusses their significance in respect to the further development of molecular, in particular genetic, medicine as an interdisciplinary field of the modern clinical sciences.