Word: celera
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Most of the excitement in the market today centers on such newcomers as Celera and Human Genome Resources, which sell their genetic data to drug companies. The hope is that these data will lay bare the road to many powerful new medicines. And I have little doubt that someday they will. Until then, though, we're still dealing with promises. If you're convinced that promises will become profits, by all means invest. But be smart about it. Buy a basket of biotechs, and limit your exposure to 5% of your total portfolio. Don't get me wrong...
...genome several times and then blasts the clones into 60 million bits, each between 2,000 and 10,000 letters long. Each fragment is then fed into a high-speed decoding robot. The next step, for Venter, is the most difficult. His robots e-mail their results to Celera's giant central database (said to represent more concentrated computing power than anywhere outside the Pentagon). These computers are using a sophisticated program to reassemble the genome fragments into the familiar 23 human chromosomes. The whole process can be compared to making confetti out of a stack of encyclopedias and then...
Venter's rivals have raised questions about how complete and accurate the finished maps will be. Venter has acknowledged that Celera's will contain some gaps, especially in the so-called repeats--long stretches of DNA with virtually identical sequences. Genome Project scientists once argued that because they have an easier time sequencing the repeats, their finished map would be more complete and error-free. They have since discovered that many regions throughout the chromosomes are unreadable even with their technology, and they are now forced to acknowledge that their product will have large gaps as well...
...best reason to keep the public Genome Project going, its scientists say, is that it is, well, public. Alarm bells rang last year when Celera announced that it had filed provisional patents on hundreds of newly discovered genes--a list that by last week had grown to include thousands of genes. Venter has pledged that he will eventually give away the completely decoded genome and make his money by selling the computer services needed to make sense of it. For now, however, he is charging $5,000 to $5 million a year to wade through his data...
...Human Genome Project, by contrast, publishes its results on the Web, free to all comers. One of its biggest users, it turns out, is Celera. Of the 90% represented in Venter's rough draft, only 81% was sequenced by Celera's robots. The rest was taken from the public website...