'A Day for the Ages'

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"There is a very long list of things that we can now do, all of which will greatly benefit medicine," said Collins. Researchers will now concentrate on finding disease-causing genes and developing therapies that treat disorders at the fundamental, molecular level.

In London, Dr. Michael Dexter of Britain's Wellcome Trust, a part of the public project, said: "Mapping the human genome has been compared to putting a man on the moon. But I believe that in terms of the future impact on society, the human genome project will be seen as the outstanding achievement, not only of our lifetime, but perhaps in the history of mankind."

"This code really is the essence of mankind," he added.

Dexter said the research should be available to all--an apparent jibe at Celera's boss, American scientist-entrepreneur J.Craig Venter, who has made no secret of wanting to profit from the discovery, possibly by patenting it. "It should not be owned by one individual, one company, or one country," Dexter said.

Scientists believe that eventually medicine will be able to identify from birth the diseases that a person may develop and to provide treatment to extend life and health beyond what was ever possible before.

"It's a giant resource," said James D. Watson, the American scientist who won the Nobel Prize in physiology for his work in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA in the early 1950s.

"Now we have the instruction book for human life and will have the instruction books for many other forms of life," Watson said in a telephone interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"Things are just going to move faster. After the printing press, there was an explosion, more people could have information. We'll understand ourselves better, have a better idea of what human nature is."

"The information obtained from the generic blueprint will have major implications for understanding disease processes--especially cancer," said Sir Paul Nurse, director general of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. The public project is a joint effort of agencies of the American National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, several universities, and the Wellcome Trust in England. Researchers in Germany and Japan also participated.