Thread: A few more questions from the noisy
bionewbie, please help!
The establishment of the SNP consortium indicates
to me that biotech companies are not going to be
patenting SNPs or snip maps, it will be public
domain. That means that any potentially valuable
patents for discovering SNPs are probably not
worth a lot. However, the Orchid website suggests
that as useful SNPs are found and linked to disease
(I assume that is what gene expression profiling is
all about) then the use of the SNP will be patentable:
They call this SNP scoring, but how much do you
suppose has to be known to construct a good SNP use
patent?
Okay, two more questions:
1. I need a genomics text, I've been putting this off,
but clearly I'm floundering here, any suggestions? I
asked once before, sorry--cant find the post with the
answer. I will do a query at sciam and nature.com for
their book reviews and try and find something myself too.
2. What is so special about a single base difference?
I'll give an example:
Surely the reason I have asthma and the reason my
wife does not, does not come down to a just a few SNPs.
And what if it is just a few SNP differences which
causes a predisposition for some disease--why should
the same SNPs be common to all asthmatics? In fact, if
I was born with a few genetic flaws that make me
predisposed to a disease, how come the asthma did not
crop up until I was 17? How strange that a person
would develop such a condition at the age when
they are the most healthy--that cant be about genes.
Sometimes I think the importance of genes has been
oversold--you don't spell God with 3 billion letters
alone. Do you?
See, told you I needed the genomics text--and probably
a few dozen more texts, and a decade to go back to
school to become a doctor--but mainly I just laugh
when I realize I am betting on companies that I
barely understand. Oh well, better to throw darts
in the next hot sector, than buy internuts I understand,
but that will never make a dime. |
