Gene map is beginning, not end, scientists say
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By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON, June 23 (Reuters) - The announcement, expected
on Monday, that two separate teams have put together a rough
map of the human genome is just the start of a long road that
will eventually transform medicine, scientists say.
Both the Human Genome Project, a publicly funded
international effort, and Celera Genomics (NYSE:CRA), are expected
to announce that they have completed the first big step toward=
unraveling the human genetic code by sequencing and assembling
the DNA that makes up the genes.
The announcement, which sources say will be made on Monday
at the White House, sounds like a huge accomplishment.
"This is it. This is the book of life," Dr. Francis Collins,
head of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI),
told reporters recently.
Banks of machines at Celera, based in Rockville, Maryland,
at the nearby Institute of Genomic Research, at the Whitehead
Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at
the Sanger Center in Cambridge, England, have been working 24
hours a day, seven days a week to crank out the series of A, T,
C and G that spell out the human genetic code.
As quickly as this sequence is spilled out, it is fed into
computers that have then assembled it into the correct order.
It could have taken years, but in the end it took months.
Celera started in September and has just finished. The slower,
more painstaking work being done by the Human Genome Project
got a shot in the arm from the huge publicity Celera has
garnered, and it raced to finish this rough draft at the same
time.
JUST THE BEGINNING
But scientists stress that having this code is only a
beginning. "This is a race to the starting line," Craig Venter,
co-founder and president of Celera said.
The real work will come in the next years and decades, as
powerful computers labor to figure out where in the miles and
miles of As, Cs, Ts and Gs the genes are. Only about three
percent of these base pairs, which are repeated over and over
again in different order, represent genes that code for the
proteins that make up everything in the body.
The rest is "junk DNA", which is perhaps misnamed as much
of it may control the functions of the genes.
"One analogy we use is the dictionary analogy -- what we
are getting right now from the Human Genome Project is a list
of the words," Dr. Arthur Sands, president and chief executive
officer of Lexicon Genetics Incorporated, one of many companies
whose goal is to exploit genetic information, said in a
telephone interview.
"Imagine a dictionary with 100,000 words and 95 percent of
it is blank where the definitions should be. Only it's worse
than that because the words are scrambled."
The next task will be to first unscramble those words, and
then find their definitions. This has already been done with
many genes, but most of the genes in the human body remain a
mystery, and scientists do not yet even know just how many
genes there are. Estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000.
"The real money in the genome is in the drugs that will be
discovered using this information," Sands said.
His and many other companies aim to find genes that can be
targeted by drugs or by therapeutic proteins. "This will be a
whole new industry with whole new companies, just as flight
created the airline industry. Some companies will adapt and
some will stay in the train business."
The other money-maker will be genetic tests that tell
people their risk of disease.
But this half of the genome story is controversial.
"As soon as the map is announced on Monday, the first
question is who is going to own the genome," Jeremy Rifkin,
president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and author of
"The Biotech Century", said in a telephone interview.
"Companies are going to be in a mad rush to locate every
single gene that is hidden in that map. What the public isn't
aware of is as soon as those genes are isolated and located and
defined, they are claimed and patented as inventions."
Rifkin is calling on world leaders to make an international
pact to protect genomic information. He also supports
legislation that would outlaw any sort of discrimination, by
employers, insurance companies or others, against people
because of their genes.
Copyright 2000, Reuters News Service |
