Word: biotechs
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Pity the beleaguered U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Even before last week's announcement by Celera, applications for patents on human genes were pouring in by the thousands. Biotech firms are seeking rights to genes that might control everything from the neurotransmitters in your brain to susceptibility to chronic diseases. The frenzy is rekindling fears that a few corporations will end up controlling a priceless resource...
...years public and private scientists have been racing at a blistering pace to decode our full genetic blueprint, or genome. At times, biotech firms, spurred by dreams of giga-bucks, appeared to be in the lead. But like an Aesopian tortoise, the government scientists working with the Human Genome Project have continued pushing along. In November they announced that they had completed mapping the first billion "letters"--or basic chemical units--in our DNA's alphabet...
Last week at Bio2000, a gathering of more than 10,000 scientists, biotech entrepreneurs and patent attorneys in Boston, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research Institute, announced another major milestone. In the past four months his international consortium of public- and foundation-funded laboratories, with its robotic machinery knocking off 12,000 units every minute, has decoded another billion letters. That puts the group two-thirds of the way toward its goal of wrapping up the entire genome of 3 billion letters. "We're on the back nine," crowed Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/M.I.T. Center...
...large part on expectations. The emergence of a new leader or leading sector reveals not necessarily which companies have been more profitable--even today General Motors makes more money than Microsoft--but which are likely to have gaudy earnings in the future. That's why technology, Internet and biotech stocks--the new economy--have been soaring the past few months. But that's also why last week, when investors felt that expectations had got out of hand in the face of higher interest rates, the new-economy stocks sold off heavily, Cisco among them...
...large industrial park with new and extensively renovated buildings faces industrial warehouses fitted for high-tech and biotech firms...