Find a good Sydney paper hyping the coming genome news. BTW, I luv your "excite" search. Venter has been keeping investors/daytraders to buy CRA on dips the past few weeks. Now one Monday in June becomes the last Monday in June? It's only 9 days away, don't sell your CRA -- yet. :)
Why BBC, Sydney news sources claim to know the exact date the BIG news will drop?! Does CRA have a rumor dept?
smh.com.au
Has the genome been overhyped?
Date: 16/06/2000
A rough draft of the entire human genetic code - genome - has been completed, a milestone in the biggest scientific race since the drive to put a man on the Moon.
This "book of life", to be unveiled on June 26, will transform society. It could mark the start of a Brave New World of designer babies, gene therapy and genetic
underclasses. Two distinguished British commentators, Matt Ridley and Steve Jones, disagree about the genome's significance.
No - it's not been overhyped, argues MATT RIDLEY
With an enthusiastic book out about the genome, I am not just contributing to the genome hype. I might even be said to have a vested interest in it. Before I
started my book, nearly three years ago, I thought the Human Genome Project was going to make a big difference to biology. After a few months in the library
and on the internet, I had changed my mind: the Human Genome Project is going to make a gigantic difference, and not just to biology. It really is BIG NEWS.
As metaphors go, the gold mine is a tired cliche, but it can be refreshed by making it literal. Scientists are a bit like gold miners, the gold they seek being
nuggets of new knowledge. Some of the mines they dig are disappointing; some start well but are soon exhausted; others prove unexpectedly productive.
On this scale, the gold strike made by James Watson and Francis Crick on February 23, 1953 - that genes are things that store biochemical instructions in a
simple, duplicate, linear digital form - has proved to lead to the richest gold mine of all. In the intervening 50 years, scientists have been hard at work sinking
the mine. Now, this month, they begin production in earnest.
The human genome contains a universe of new information to explore and understand. Take just one example. From 1872 to 1993, virtually nothing was
known about Huntington's disease except that it ran in families. In 1993, the responsible gene was discovered. Since then, more than 100 scientists in more
than 20 countries have published new insights into what the gene does, how it goes wrong and what might be done to cure Huntington's. Even a summary of the
studies stretches to hundreds of pages.
And that is just one gene. There are at least 30,000 more, possibly four times as many. Ten years ago, only a handful were known. A year ago, only a few
thousand were known. Within weeks, they will all be known. In just a few months we have gone from striking a match in one corner of a cathedral to
switching on the floodlights.
The medical implications are immense. I have watched over his shoulder as an Italian scientist logs on to the internet to read from a Cambridge data base the
newly sequenced part of a human chromosome where he thinks there lies a gene that can predispose people to kidney stones. What would before have been
several years' work is now a few clicks of a mouse.
The completion of the genome will transform the prediction, prevention, treatment and understanding of disease. Its greatest possibilities lie in the field of
cancer, a disease caused exclusively by misbehaving genes. But it will affect ailments from depression to heart attacks.
Some are impatiently asking why this has not yet happened, which is a bit like a child saying, "Are we there yet?" 10 miles into a long journey. Proving that
treatments are safe and effective takes many years, so the flood of new diagnostic tests and drugs now being developed will not be in your local hospital
tomorrow. But 20 years hence, medicine may be unrecognisable.
Craig Venter, the man who has almost single-handedly brought this revolution forward from the distant future and forced it to happen this month, puts it more
pithily: "With this technology we are literally coming out of the dark ages of biology. As a civilisation, we know far less than one per cent of what will be
known about biology, human physiology and medicine. My view of biology is, "We don't know s---.' "
The medical applications matter desperately - and anybody who has watched a friend die of cancer will see the urgency of pressing ahead, rather than
tip-toeing cautiously - but they are not even the biggest ones. Nor are the ethical implications. It is true that genetic knowledge opens new possibilities for
tampering with nature, for transforming health insurance for the worse and for invading privacy. Vital as they are, none of these is qualitatively different from
the ethical dilemmas we face today.
What for me is more important than all these issues is the philosophical import of the new knowledge. Hidden inside the genome are thousands of genes, and
millions of non-gene stretches of DNA, each of which tells a secret about the past, the present or the future.
There are genes that tell us what the first creatures on earth looked like more than three billion years ago. There are genes that tell us how our brains are
equipped to produce grammatical language, one of the key distinguishing features of being human. There are genes that tell us about the body plan of an animal
that lived 600 million years ago - the common ancestor of people and fruit flies. There are genes that tell us which of our ancestors took up dairy farming and
when. There are genes that tell us how rapidly we will age. There are genes that tell us which infectious diseases our recent ancestors suffered from.
Above all, there are genes that promise to solve old mysteries of determinism and free will. Are our actions determined by what happened to us a few minutes
ago (behaviourism), by what our parents did to us a few decades ago (psychoanalysis), by what our ancestors did a few hundred thousand years ago
(evolutionary psychology) or by random chance? The answer to such a question has eluded the greatest philosophical minds for centuries. It will never be
settled for certain, but the new insights that can be gathered from the genome will transform it forever.
For example, we already know of 17 human genes, expressed in the brain, whose job is to lay down new memories by the creation of new connections
between brain cells. Those genes are at the mercy of our behaviour, so they do not determine that behaviour as much as result from it. Yet in acting they affect
our future behaviour, too. That is why we experience the genuine sensation of free will, while not being random beings.
These are just a very few of the many insights drawn from the few genes discovered and studied in the late 1990s. Now - this month - thanks to the efforts of
the Human Genome Project, there will be a thousand times as many stories to tell. To paraphrase Sir Edward Grey, the lights are coming on all over biology.
Matt Ridley is the author of: Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters
YES - it is overhyped - STEVE JONES
"Sulston essentially called us a fraud. It's like he's been bit by a rabid animal." Thus, in this week's New Yorker, Craig Venter (head of Celera
Genomics, the privately funded attempt to sequence human DNA) on the director of the British laboratory involved in the public attempt to do the same
job.
Why such bitterness? For Venter, it's C.A.S.H.; but most of the public fuss has to do with the four letters most associated with the announcement of the
(more or less) complete gene sequence, which are H.Y.P. and E.
The four real letters of the code will, hyperbolists tell us, revolutionise biology, medicine and our view of ourselves. Really? Here's a bit of real code:
AACCGGCAG. That's the start of a sequence of DNA unique to the human brain; one of the tiny proportion of our genes not also found in chimps.
Within it, apparently, is written part of what it means to be human. Recite those letters, roll them around the tongue. Feel different, any new philosophical
insights? Of course not: there is more to life than chemistry.
But what about medicine? Genes are certainly important. If you are reading this article on a train, glance at the person to your left and to your right.
Then, comfort yourself with the knowledge that two of the three of you will die as a result of your genes. Should that be unwelcome, it is worth
remembering that a century ago (and depending on the age of your companions) two of the three of you would be dead already.
In Mendel's day, mortality came from outside: from starvation, infection, or cold. Now, things are different. We face the enemy within; our innate failings,
central as they are to ailments such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer. As a result, most people nowadays die of a genetic disease (although not many
notice).
Why, then, am I dismissive about the human genome project? Don't get me wrong: it is an astonishing piece of research in micro-anatomy; a
breakthrough equivalent to Vesalius's dissection of the heart in 1543. But it is anatomy, not surgery. The first heart transplant, it is worth remembering,
was in 1967.
In biology, it can be hard to match science with technology. The skies over the sequencing labs are darkening with the wings of chickens coming home to
roost. Where, after all the cash and the promises, is the payback? The bad news is: don't expect it for a while - not 400 years, maybe; but in my estimate
nearer 40 than four.
DNA transplants have been just around the corner for the past decade - and that is where they are likely to remain. In spite of all the fuss about gene
therapy there is not a single convincing case in which that treatment given alone has cured a disease (with one possible, very recent, exception).
Recently, someone with cystic fibrosis stood up after one of my talks and said she was optimistic because she would soon be cured by a gene transplant.
Sadly - disgracefully, given the false prospectus peddled by the biotech industry - her hopes are premature. In the United States, "gene-therapy"
laboratories are closing down, and those that remain are much more cautious than they were. Her symptoms can now be treated more successfully than a
decade ago, but that has nothing to do with genetics: it comes from the standard advances of medical technology.
What about the ability to find those at risk and at least to prevent the birth of damaged children? Unfortunately, what should be simple again turns out to
be complicated. Cystic fibrosis follows Mendel's laws, and one British couple in 500 is at risk of having an affected child. The human gene sequence must,
surely, give certainty to those in doubt about the risks of this and other diseases.
However, the gene can be damaged in many ways. Every population - sometimes, every family - may have its own mutation. A test that detects an error in
one does not work for others. More than a thousand different CF mutations are known. One causes most of the cases in Western Europe, but in the
Middle East is found in just a small proportion of patients. One illness, an alteration in a single gene, has, it transpires, a multiplicity of causes.
That problem is spectacularly worse for the many common diseases with an inherited component. Such conditions (heart disease, diabetes and the like),
although they run in families, involve many genes that come together each generation in shifting constellations whose effects are hard to predict.
Often, genes are involved in some cases but not in others. For example, one form of heart disease is influenced by a gene that codes for messages sent
from nerves to muscles. However, many others with a weak effect are also involved. Some families, for example, have a tendency towards high blood
cholesterol, but almost 200 different combinations of genes can generate the effect. Risk is also affected by how fat a person is (which itself has an inborn
element). Most people with the illness have drawn an unlucky hand of several low-value DNA cards. Together they increase the danger but any one is of
little use in prediction, let alone treatment.
In fact, such families are easier to identify with a simple blood-cholesterol test than with the most complicated DNA technology. And, of course, the
outside world is also much involved. If everyone ate the Scottish diet, heart disease would be (more or less) a genetic disease. As a result, to ban
cheeseburgers and cigarettes would do more to reduce mortality than anything molecular biology can ever do. Ironically enough, one major contribution
of the genome project has been to emphasise the importance of the environment.
In fact the most dangerous three-letter word in our science is "for": geneticists (unlike the public) known that to find a gene "for" - say - schizophrenia
or heart disease means much less than it seems. Now all that remains is to admit to the subject's four-letter problems and to how little of any practical
value that the gene-sequencers have actually achieved.
Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College, London
The Daily Telegraph |
