The genetic research offers new ways to hit the world's most dangerous insect, and stop its parasite at any point in its life cycle. Almost half the world lives in the shadow of malaria, which infects 500 million people and kills a child every 20 seconds.
Knowledge of the parasite's makeup has already pointed scientists towards six potential drugs, including one widely used in mouthwash and toothpastes. New weapons against an enemy that has been quietly crippling the economies of African nations could be ready in as little as five years. Researchers in London and Washington yesterday were exultant.
"Eradicating malaria is now more than just a dream," said Brian Greenwood, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
"It will also require much more money than the $200m currently spent every year on this problem. It requires research institutions and communities to see malaria as a central challenge, rather than a peripheral challenge. These are daunting requirements."
Carlos Morel, of the World Health Organisation, said: "This is an extraordinary moment in the history of science. At last, the enormous power of modern technology is penetrating the mysteries of an ancient disease, a disease that continues to kill millions."
The science involved cooperation between hundreds of scientists in dozens of institutions in more than 10 nations. One consortium painstakingly assembled the entire genetic code of Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly form of the parasite, published in the British journal Nature today. The other sequenced the DNA of the malarial mosquito Anopheles gambiae, published in the US journal Science tomorrow.
The parasite needs two hosts, human and mosquito, to complete its life cycle, reproduce and claim new victims. The research has revealed that about half of the parasite's genes are new to biology, but those that are known have begun to throw light on why quinine and the sulphur drugs were so successful - and why the parasite has evolved resistance almost worldwide to prophylactics such as chloroquine.
Since the human genome was decoded two years ago, researchers now have precise biological information about all three players in malaria's dance of death. Genes make proteins and trigger processes which are common to mosquito, human and parasite, which is why antimalarial drugs can have powerful side effects: what stops the parasite may also affect the host. But somewhere in the mass of ge netic data, researchers said, were identifiable targets for every possible vaccine and every possible drug: the challenge was to find the treatments that would hit the parasite or control the mosquito without harming the patient.
"We have presented them with a haystack, and now they have to go and find the needle," said Neil Hall of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. Fotis Kafatos, of the European molecular laboratory in Heidelberg, warned that the parasite was a cunning enemy. "Many discoveries lie ahead. Sequencing and analysing the genome was only a beginning. But what a wonderful beginning," he said.
Malaria kills nearly three million people each year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Along with HIV and tuberculosis, it is one of the world's biggest killers. Each year, the parasite costs the equivalent of 45m years of productive human life through premature death and physical weakness.
Kofi Annan, secretary general of the UN, said: "Malaria not only imposes an apalling degree of human suffering, it also constitutes an obstacle to development itself."
In effect, diseases such as malaria keep the poorest nations poor. But the worry is that pharmaceutical companies will be in no hurry to develop drugs for people who cannot afford them. More than 1,200 new drugs were registered between 1975 and 1996, according to Nature. Only three were anti-malarials.