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Science

Human Genome Project Complete 12

Posted by chrisd from the get-yours-now dept.
nilepoc writes "The Human Genome project is finally done. Done being a relative term, due to the variability of DNA. 'You can think of this as the end of the high-throughput phase of human sequencing. The fact that it's yielded up 99% of the gene-containing DNA at this level of accuracy means that almost everybody who is looking for answers from the genome will find it in the most final form that they ever could have dreamed of,' Collins said in a BioMedCentral Article. Let the patenting begin."
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Human Genome Project Complete More

Human Genome Project Complete

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  • Now all this work has been done what do people think will be the first high value use. Both in $ and as a life enrichment
  • If you read this other article [biomedcentral.com] you get the distinct impression that scientists in this field want to make the results of these big key reseaches freely available. They even say in these changing times, probably referring to the increased expected opennes prompted by the internet. (And possibly open source as well).

    You see the same "changing times" with the journals. In my research field they found out that a paper that's freely available on the internet gets quoted at least three times as often as a paper that's "locked away" in a "proprietary" journal... (Couldn't find the link I was searching for for that figure, sorry).

    Reinout

  • Science by press-release (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RobotWisdom ( 25776 ) on Thursday April 17, 2003 @07:04AM (#5750018) Homepage
    I read the science headlines every day at NewsHub [newshub.com] and it's distressing to see how fake a lot of this 'news' is-- if a scientist craves publicity, there are certain themes they can appeal to that the press seems to get excited about for no good scientific reason (the oldest anything, black holes, asteroid impacts, etc).

    I'd be interested to know exactly how different this 'really really complete' genome is from the fakety-fake 'complete' genome they announced a few years back.

    The rumor then was that it was the egomaniac Venter's own DNA they were using, so calling it 'the' human genome is another big lie-- one of the most interesting uses for the data is to cross-compare different ethnicities (and different species) and use this to reconstruct the human family tree. So the fact that one person's genome is the first to be sequenced will quickly become insignificant to the overall picture.

    • Scientists don't usually crave anything but discovery and new science. Not press releases. The reason there is an announcement now, is because years ago there was a meeting of leaders of the mighty sequencing centers: Sanger, Wash-U, etc. and also prominent scientists involved. Francis Collins mentioned "Hey wouldn't it be cool if we had this done in April 2003. 50 years after the Watson/Crick DNA structure paper was published in Nature." James Watson was in the room apparently, and loved the idea. S
    • Also, in June 2000 when President Clinton had the big party for the genome, and then in early 2001 when the genome paper was published, the genome then was in a crudely complete state. That's why they called it a "draft sequence". The reason for the big celebration was that it was finally actually usable for scientists so it was made available to them.

      Andy
  • Now if they plan on patenting genes, wouldn't there be a prior art issue? I've had these genes all my life...so have most of the rest of you. I am curious how one person/group/company, can patent something that belongs to us all.

  • Gnome [gnome.org] did WHAT?

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