LA JOLLA, California — When President Bill Clinton announced in 2000 that Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute had succeeded in mapping the human genome, he solemnly declared that the discovery would “revolutionize” the treatment of virtually all human disease.

The expectation was that this single reference map of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA — the human genetic code — would quickly unlock the secrets of Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer and other scourges of human health.

As it turns out, Clinton’s forecast was not unlike President George Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech in the early days of the Iraq war, said Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Translational Science Institute, which is running a meeting On the Future of Genomic Medicine here March 6-7.

Thirteen years after Clinton’s forecast, even Venter acknowledges that mapping the human genome has had little clinical impact. “Yes, there’s been progress, but we all would have hoped it would have been more rapid,” he said in an interview in his offices this week.

But that is finally changing.

“We are at an inflection point,” said Collins, who now directs the National Institutes of Health. In a telephone interview, he said he never expected an […]