The Human Genome Project (PGH) ended in April 2003. Although it revolutionized medical knowledge, its benefits have rarely been felt in Africa. New work, published this week in the journal Nature, underscores that the fact that this project focused on populations of high-income countries it has been detrimental to the global understanding of the world’s health and disease.

A) Yes, less than 2% of human genomes analyzed so far have been african people, according to a study published in Cell in 2019. All this despite the fact that Africa, where the human being originated, contains more genetic diversity than any other continent.

For Ambroise Wonkam, an expert from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and author of this opinion article, “the knowledge and applications of genomics have benefited very little to the south of the world, due to the inequalities in the health systems, the scarce workforce location for research and lack of funding ”.