FOREWORD

In the April 1993 issue of Trend in Genetics, five eminent geneticists were asked about the future of Genetics in the 21st century. They all produced very interesting answers, but those from Sidney Brenner were the most brief, sharp and comprehensive: 1) cloning and sequencing of DNA gives the means to pursue most of the aims of classical experimental genetics without the need for breeding experiments. So, genetics based on breeding mutants and complementing and mapping them will become extinct in the 21st century; and 2) its place will be filled by transgenesis and interaction; that is, functional Genetics based on composition rather than decomposition. And he added: “I almost forgot to say that genetics will disappear as a separate science, because in the 21st century eveything in biology will become gene-based, and every biologist will be a geneticist”.

It is more than obvious that Genetics is still far from Brenner’s predictions, especially in Spain. Nevertheless, it is no less true that the recent genome projects of model organisms Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana and that of Homo sapiens, for its social and economic implications, have opened wide perspectives in Genetics. The benefits deriving from this knowledge will be immense and will affect all human beings. Consequently, the degree of responsibility bestowed on geneticists is enormous, and as Brenner perceived, it applies to all biologists as well. We accept this responsibility: the inescapable “duty” to disentangle the genetic information behind the construction of living organisms and to show how variations in this information are the substrate of evolution for all species and, at the same time, the cause of human disorders and pathological conditions.

Barcelona, June 2001