Word: approach
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pasteur, was better than yours? Not exactly. It's not even to say that a Harvard education emphasizes the wrong aspects. Quite the opposite, really. For it is not the purpose of college to enable a life of the mind. It is to teach students how to think and approach problems, and to discover what moves them, precisely so that when we finally do leave, we may find something interesting and inspiring to do with ourselves...
...while the genome project has been methodically chronicling the details of human cells--including long stretches of DNA, amounting to some 97% of the total, that contain no genes at all--private companies have opted for a very different approach. Their maps are more like satellite photographs that take in the entire route but concentrate only on the highlights. "The thing people are highly interested in," says Randal Scott, president and chief scientific officer at Incyte Pharmaceuticals, based in Palo Alto, Calif., one of the players in the private-sector gene-mapping game, "is where all the cities...
Scott's rivals at Genset, based in France, are taking a similar approach: their map, to be completed in early 2000, will highlight just 60,000 of some 10 million biochemical "beacons" found along the human genome. By comparing the DNA of many individuals in and around these signposts, Genset hopes to pick out specific genes whose malfunctions actually cause disease. It has already begun to work. Using this technique, says Genset chief genomics officer Dr. Daniel Cohen, the company has found two different genes involved in prostate cancer. Cohen points out that the 20 most common diseases, which kill...
...narrowly focused as their efforts are, Cohen and Scott are using gene-mapping techniques that are not very different from the Human Genome Project's. Craig Venter, on the other hand, has taken a radical approach, one that resembles paper shredding more than it does mapmaking...
...fact that the VEG-F gene seems to turn off after three or four weeks makes little difference in this trial because the new blood vessels have already sprouted and remain in place. Still, for this and other reasons, the naked-DNA approach is applicable to only a handful of disorders...