Scientists Revise Map of Human Genome?

Question

What is everyone's take on this article?

http://voanews.com/english/archive/2006-11/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm?CFID=24061736&CFTOKEN=55094380

Answer 1

The article is actually very misleading, and obviously written by someone with no scientific background.

If I was 10-12% "different" genetically from the next person I'd be a different species!

I've read the original Paper by the scientist "quoted" as the VOA authors source. The genome is not 10-12% different, but rather over 10-12% of the genome you can find these hypervariable regions. But even though the regions collectively equal 10-12%, there's a good deal in there that remains the same.

Also, we've known for more than 20 years now that there are variable sites with different numbers of repeats - called VNTR regions. These are generally quite small. The scientific paper covers CNV regions, which are larger segments, some of which "could" encompass genes or gene segments, but the author of the VOA article has again misunderstood, assuming people have extra genes and her poor sentence structure even implies you sometimes get extra chromosomes - we are all having a bit of a laugh here at how the article was written.

You should got to Nature.com and get the original article if you really want to know the true story. You may have to actually pay to download it unless your library has a subscription to Nature.

Answer 2

Science at work.

Research has led them to revise their findings.