Geneticists limbered up for the annual meeting of the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) by inviting residents of the host city, Edinburgh, to air their hopes and fears in the post-genome sequence world.

"It's very special this year as the human genome sequence has emerged," said Veronica van Heyningen of the Medical Research Council's Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, introducing the Human Genome Meeting (HGM) 2001 Public Forum. "It's important to convey what this means."

More drugs, for one thing, claimed Glaxo-SmithKline spokesman Peter Goodfellow. With 30,000 genes now potential drug targets and growing information on the small sequence variations associated with human diseases, "a bottleneck has been removed."

Three out of ten people prescribed a drug experience no benefit, says Goodfellow. Individual genome information is heralded as bringing more effective personalised medicine -- so called pharmacogenetics.

But the much-hyped medical advances won't come tomorrow: 10-15 years is the current drug-to-market time. "The revolution won't be a tidal wave", said Alastair Kent of the UK's Genetics Interest Group, "more like rising damp."

Representing patient groups living with genetic disease, Kent advocated continued genetic research despite potential risks of genetic information misuse. "If we don't pursue it we are saying that our fear of abuse is greater than patients' hope of escape," he said.

Bartha Maria Knoppers, who chairs the HUGO's Ethics Committee raised concerns over privacy of genetic information being collected in growing numbers of gene banks -- one of several ethical conundrums that this year's HGM will surely return to.

Tackling another fear, genetic enhancement, David Cox of Stanford University assured that "Looking at a sequence and knowing which parts are hooked up with a trait will not allow us to alter it at will."

Whether the public gained much from the forum is hard to gauge. Of a sell-out 250 tickets, only a handful went to self confessed 'lay-people': the high level of the talks didn't help.

"Most people are more interested in reading about football or the Royal family," said Hans Galjaard, a clinical geneticist from Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Young people might not care about their predisposition to disease and how to prevent it. "I'm 66 - I'm very interested in this life expectancy thing," he joked.