Robert, are you still holding Cra?
Not a good day for gene crowd.
>
Rockville, Maryland, March 14 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of PE Corp.'s Celera Genomics Group, which is mapping the human genetic code, lost a quarter of their value after the governments of U.S. and U.K. called for such data to be freely available to scientists everywhere.
Celera shares fell 47 1/2, or 25 percent, to 141 1/2 in late morning trading. Shares of a competitor, Incyte Pharmaceuticals Inc., fell 25 15/16, or 13 percent, to 171 1/16.
U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said they want the data discovered by the mapping of human genes to be available for research. Celera and Incyte plan to sell the data they compile to drugmakers and researchers.
Shares of other companies engaged in genomics research also fell. Shares of Regeneron Pharmaceutical Inc. fell 4 15/32, or 12 percent, to 32 3/8, while Human Genome Sciences Inc. fell 19 9/16, or 13 percent, to 133. Gene Logic Inc. fell 11, or 13 percent, to 72. Shares of Affymetrix Inc. fell 34 1/4 to 204, while Protein Design Labs Inc. fell 36 7/8 to 220.
The Wall Street Journal said some drugmakers, including Glaxo Wellcome Plc, Pfizer Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., want the U.S. sponsored Human Genome Project to release its data quickly, which would also hurt publicly traded researchers.
``We applaud the decision by scientists working on the human genome project to release raw fundamental information about the human DNA sequence and its variants rapidly into the public domain, and we commend other scientists around the world to adopt this policy,' Clinton and Blair said in a joint statement.
Mar/14/2000 11:20 |
