lmao at the government lamers.
Genome announcement 'publicity,' not 'science'
United Press International - April 06, 2000 22:12
Jump to first matched term
ST. LOUIS, April 6, (UPI) -- A scientist working on the government
sponsored human genome project says Thursday's announcement by a private
company that it has identified the complete genetic code of a person may
have had more to do with publicity than science.
"It's not a huge deal," says John McPherson, co-director of the genome
sequencing program at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's a press
release by a company trying to grab some headlines and boost their stock
prices."
The announcement was made by Celera Genomics, a Rockville, Md.-based
company that has been racing with the federal Human Genome Project to
complete a blueprint of human genes.
"We announced this morning that we have now completed the sequencing
phase of the genome of one human being," said Dr. J. Craig Venter,
president and chief scientific officer the company. "This is a very
exciting milestone for Celera and an exciting milestone for all of us."
The next step will be to assemble all these DNA fragments, or
sequences, in their proper order, a process that should take about three
to six weeks, Dr. Venter said Thursday at a hearing of the U.S. House
of Representatives Subcommittee on Science, held to assess the progress
of the public and private efforts in deciphering the human genetic code.
Until Celera puts the billions of pieces of raw data into some kind of
order, says McPherson, scientists won't know whether the sequences are
right.
McPherson says, "It's like having the puzzle in pieces, but they
haven't put it together yet."
The federally funded project should be completed by June, and "we're
assembling it as we go along." So he anticipates having a more accurate
product shortly after Celera finishes putting its puzzle together.
At the end of March at the annual meeting of the Biotechnology
Industry Organization in Boston, Francis Collins, director of the Human
Genome Project said that the publicly funded team had deciphered
two-thirds of the more than three billion letters of the human genetic
code, and that the work was two years ahead of schedule.
Celera Genomics uses an automated method called whole genome shotgun
sequencing to speed up DNA research. The federal scientists use a more
methodical approach that examines one gene at a time.
Venter said the company was started 18 months ago because the
government funded project "looked like it was going to be years and
years from completion." Venter figured his technique could speed up
things and set up the company to go about doing it. The company started
working on the human sequence seven months ago.
The final step will be to interpret and label these combinations of
letters, a process called annotation, said Venter. Following the
assembly of the genome, he plans to hold an "annotation jamboree," a
kind of cram session in which leading genetics researchers work together
and with little downtime, to make some sense of the data.
But, Venter says, that the annotated sequence will be just the
beginning. It will take decades, even centuries, to figure out what it
all means and how it can be applied to the treatment and prevention of
human diseases.
Venter says, "Our understanding of this code is in its absolute
infancy."
Celera's announcement comes on the heels of its publication of the
genome of the fruit fly, the largest sequence so far, which was
completed through a partnership between private and public laboratories.
It used the "whole genome shotgun sequence," Venter said, "a method 18
months ago people told this very committee would not work and would lead
to catastrophic failure."
He said, "We're pleased to announce it did not lead to failure and we're
pretty excited about it."
Venter, who has been criticized for not releasing some of his data,
says he plans to publish the human results in a scientific journal, as
was done with the fruit fly, once he has an annotated version.
Venter says his company, which has grown from 12 employees to about
500, is also working on decoding the mouse genome. McPherson also says
that once the human genome is sequenced, the federal laboratories will
move onto the mouse because of its importance in helping to understand
human genes.
Celera has also been at the center of the heated debates over who owns
the information coded in the human genome, and whether private companies
should be able to patent it.
Venter told the subcommittee that his company has no intention of
patenting the human genome. Only genes deemed potentially useful in
the identification of new drugs will be patented, he said.
Celera, which plans to make its profits by selling information to
companies scouring the genome to find uses for new drugs, took a hit
after President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that
human genome data should be publicly available. This was interpreted to
mean no patents on genes. Shares of Celera stock plunged 21 percent,
dragging the rest of the biotech market down.
But on Wednesday, Celera got a boost from Clinton's statement at a
conference on the new economy.
"Tony Blair and I crashed the markets for a day or two and I didn't
mean to," the president said. "General information ought to be in the
public domain as much as possible about the human genome. Where public
money contributed to basic research we ought to get it out there. If
someone did it with private money, they ought to get a patent on it."
-- if it's not a big deal why is our tax money being spent on his salary? |
