What does it all mean to you?

Nearly 20 years ago, I introduced a special series of articles for Trends in Neurosciences (5:295, 1982) that sought to illustrate some of the then-latest developments in molecular neuroscience. That was the time when neuroscientists were beginning to borrow heavily from the nascent field of molecular genetics, just as we had previously borrowed flagrantly from the previously powerful fields of biophysics and cell biology. The tools of that day seemed quite novel and powerful: the ability to make cDNA libraries carrying modest-sized inserts of mammalian mRNAs, the ability to isolate and amplify these cloned segments of active genes, and the ability to make what seemed to be rapid determinations of the sequences of those mRNAs and deduce the likely amino acid sequences of their gene products. Even more exciting then was the prospect, realized in less than 2 years, of detecting gene mutations that cause inheritable neurological diseases such as Huntington's. We fast-forward our retrospectoscope to the present and recognize what primitive times we were then entering, to which the intervening progress has added PCR to amplify genetic information and to do so quantitatively, the ability to identify disease-associated or disease-causing genetic mutations and to develop transgenic animals that express those genes, the ability to knock out the expression of their natural counterparts, the ability to apply a variety of strategies to turn up or down the expression of specific genes in specific neurons at specific times after birth, and the ability to determine what unknown proteins interact with proteins just discovered to mediate, for example the process by which synaptic vesicles store their transmitter, discharge it under Ca-dependent, voltage-dependent conditions, and then reconstitute themselves for reloading with fresh transmitter molecules. Implicit in all these advances is the automation of data collection and analysis and the ability to enlist the computer as a user-friendly wizard to search the data and deduce useful patterns within them. And as a vaudevillian performer might have been tempted to announce, " We ain't seen nothing yet! " The single largest bolus of molecular information ever infused into the research community was ushered in with a publicly proclaimed political event in June of 2000 and finally presented in published form this past February: namely, the initial " draft " inventory of the human genome. What this phrase means in simple terms is that by using advanced versions of the powerful methods of molecular biology, several …