![]() This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.Ĭopyright © 2005 NPR. The research on the chimpanzee genome appears in the journals Nature and Science. These include genes involved in perceiving sound and transmitting nerve signals. HAMILTON: So far scientists have identified several types of genes that are changing faster in both humans and chimps than in other animals. It's been changed over the last tens of thousands of years by civilization and diet and infectious disease, as it's being changed today, for example, with the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Our environment is certainly not fixed in any way. Species are still evolving in response to environments as they change. Lander says chimps and humans took different genetic paths about six million years ago. ![]() HAMILTON: The chimp genome also is helping scientists figure out how humans are changing. It looks like it's just true of us because the chimpanzee has a functioning version of that gene, and chimps don't seem to get Alzheimer's, at least not as far as we know, at the level that we do. COLLINS: We've thought for some time, well, that might be something that's true of lots of organisms. In humans, caspase-12 is turned off, but Collins says no one knew if that was unusual. It's involved in the degeneration of brain cells. The difference involves a gene called caspase-12. HAMILTON: Collins says scientists have already found one genetic difference that could add to their understanding of Alzheimer's disease. So being able to compare the genomes letter by letter to try to understand those differences and how we might capitalize on them to improve medicine was one of the main reasons to do this study. FRANCIS COLLINS (Director, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH): Chimps don't get cancer at the same level that humans do. He says one of those questions has to do with cancer. Francis Collins directs the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH. But medical researchers hope the chimp genome will also answer some highly specific questions. And it's an open invitation to scientists studying medicine to be able to home in on those unique aspects of the human species and understand how they give us our unique physiology, our unique responses to disease, our unique susceptibilities and some of our unique behavioral traits. LANDER: For the first time we've now laid out on the table the whole menu of genetic differences between humans and chimps. An early draft showed how humans and chimps are alike, but Lander says this version offers something even more valuable. Scientists have been waiting eagerly for the chimpanzee sequence. Unfortunately, Clint died of a heart problem before his DNA could make him famous. HAMILTON: It took more than 60 researchers to complete the genetic sequence of the chimpanzee. ![]() LANDER: Charles Darwin couldn't have asked for a more spectacular confirmation of his very controversial prediction back in 1871 that the great apes were our closest relatives. Lander says a mouse and a rat are about 10 times more different genetically than a chimp and a human. ![]() HAMILTON: That still leaves 40 million differences, though that's not a lot in genetic terms. If we line up the DNA letters, at the positions where they can be aligned-were 99 percent identical, only one letter difference out of a hundred between humans and chimps. ERIC LANDER (MIT Broad Institute): Humans and chimps are remarkably similar. Eric Lander of MIT and the Broad Institute says the new genetic sequence makes one thing very clear. Scientists unveiled the chimp genome at a press conference today. Scientists say studying the genes of an ape will help them understand what it means to be human. This analysis comes from the first detailed reading of the chimpanzee genome. A new genetic analysis confirmed something that Charles Darwin suggested more than a century ago: Humans and chimps have a lot in common.
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