Washington: The Human Genome Project, the most ambitious biomedical research project ever undertaken, which was declared officially completed 13 years after its launch may alter humanity's sense of itself, according to experts.

Project leaders immediately unveiled a formal plan on April 14 to catapult the genetic findings into every sphere of life, including plans that even proponents said would raise difficult social, ethical and legal questions, 'The Washington Post' reported.

The roadmap for future studies calls for new research into the role genes play in race, ethnicity, in influencing personality traits and behaviours, including mental illness; and in other politically sensitive aspects of the human condition.

Experts predicted that the results will have profound scientific impact and will ultimately revise humanity's sense of itself.

"We are learning at a very rapid clip how we are all the same and how we are different," said Francis Collins, chief of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the US government's National Institute of Health.

The US institute spearheaded the American part of the international effort along with the department of energy.

The project's formal completion, announced at a celebratory scientific meeting in Bethesada (Maryland), where the National Institute of Health are located, occurred 2 am on April 14, Collins said. That was just two hours after the project's self- imposed deadline, when scientists at the project's 16 laboratories around the world e-mailed final bits of the genetic code to a centralised database.

The final sequence, completed at a cost of $ 2.6 billion, provides the exact order of virtually all 3 billion letters of the human genetic code. It fills in holes and corrects errors of a "working draft" that was feted at a White House ceremony in 2000.

Congratulations for the completion of the project came from President Bush and five other countries that participated in the project--Britain (whose Wellcome Trust funded about a third of the project), Japan, France, Germany and China.

Ari Patrinos, who led the Energy department's contribution, said, "I stand in awe at this joyous occasion", adding that they are already focusing on the future.

The Energy department has begun an initiative called Genomes to Life, which will use technologies developed for the genome project to work on environmental cleanups, climate change and the search for new energy sources.

The department released a new roadmap prepared by more than 600 scientists at a dozen workshops.

It sets major goals in applying Genomics to medicine and health, including an ambitious effort to find new gene-based drugs and genetic tests to predict diseases before they occur.

The plan, to be published in the April 24 issue of "Nature", will have a focus on "heritable human genetic variation".

This will include how race and ethnicity influence people's susceptibility to disease and affect their responses to medicines, and how it affects people's sense of identifying and kinship and their perception of what is "normal".

It also calls for more research in behavioural genetics, a controversial field that looks for "inborn" propensities to certain behaviours.

PTI