Silicon Valley is a nickname for a swath of communities engaged in high-technology research and manufacturing. This name is also given to one such region in western California.In the second half of the 20th century the region from San Francisco south to San Jose acquired the name Silicon Valley as a tribute to its key role in the emergence of the personal computer, software, biotechnology, and other high-technology industries. Important hardware and software innovators developed there, including Apple Computer, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, Netscape Communications Corporation, and 3Com Corporation, along with biotechnology leaders such as Genentech, Inc. These developments just down the peninsula had a major impact on San Francisco as well. During the 1990s, one part of the South-of-Market area became home to so many multimedia companies that it acquired the nickname Multimedia Gulch. In addition, venture capital firms specializing in high-technology start-up companies have located in San Francisco as well as in Silicon Valley.
More detailed information can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human Genome/home.shtml.
2. Human Genome ProjectHuman Genome Project is the international scientific collaboration that seeks to understand the entire genetic blueprint of a human being. This genetic information is found in each cell of the body, encoded in the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Through a process known as sequencing, the Human Genome Project has so far identified nearly all of the estimated 31,000 genes (the basic units of heredity) in the nucleus of a human cell. The project has also mapped the location of these genes on the 23 pairs of human chromosomes, the structures containing the genes in the cell's nucleus.
The data derived from mapping and sequencing the human genome will help scientists associate specific human traits and inherited diseases with particular genes at precise locations on the chromosomes. This advance will help provide an unparalleled understanding of the fundamental organization of human genes and chromosomes. Many scientists believe that the Human Genome Project has the potential to revolutionize both therapeutic and preventive medicine by providing insights into the basic biochemical processes that underlie many human diseases.The idea of undertaking a coordinated study of the human genome arose from a series of scientific conferences held between 1985 and 1987. The Human Genome Project began in earnest in the United States in 1990 with the expansion of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy (DOE). One of the first directors of the US program was American biochemist James Watson, who in 1962 shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with British biophysicists Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Many nations have official human genome research programs as part of this collaboration, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan. In a separate project intended to speed up the sequencing process and commercialize the results, Celera Genomics, a privately funded biotechnology company, used a different method to assemble the sequence of the human genome. Both the public consortium and Celera Genomics completed the first phase of the project, and they each published a draft of the human genome simultaneously, although in separate journals, in February 2001.
More detailed information can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human Genome/home.shtml.
