Narrator: This is Science Today. One-third of the human genetic pattern has been sequenced, bringing the government's Human Genome Project's goal to meet a 2003 deadline, right on schedule. Treavor Hawkins of the Los Alamos National Laboratory directs one of the government's five sequencing centers and says by March, the first of two working drafts will be complete.

Hawkins: People might ask why you are drafting and then doing a higher draft and then doing a finished? The reason for this is that the biologists around the world who have spent years and years trying to find the gene that's been their life working on - you know, just a little bit of sequence information will help them nail that gene down to a particular region on the chromosome.

Narrator: So far, one billion of the three billion chemical base pairs in the pattern have been identified, sequenced and published on a public database.

Hawkins: This is an incredible boost to biology all around the world and we know that every pharmaceutical company in the U.S., around the world, sucks our data off our website every night, because there's valuable information in there that one can use.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.