Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very significant achievement." That was an understatement. Under the leadership of its brash, brilliant president, Craig Venter, Celera had beaten a big-budget, government-funded program in the race to sequence the human genome--to spell out the molecular "letters" that make up the genetic code embedded in our DNA...
...vilified Venter as untrustworthy and unscrupulous and said he would make the book of life "read like Mad magazine." Venter, for his part, has portrayed the official genome project as a bumbling bureaucracy. Personalities aside, the two efforts are based on very different techniques. The government scientists broke their DNA samples into segments of about 150 million letters long (the overall genome has some 3.4 billion letters). These were subdivided into segments of about 6,000 letters each, to be read by sequencing machines. In the final step, the pieces were reassembled into their original order on the chromosomes...
Venter, by contrast, took a more radical approach, smashing the DNA into millions of pieces, then feeding each into new high-speed robotic sequencers. By March 27, Celera had all of them read, though they will not be reassembled for three to six weeks. And lots more work remains to be done after that. Figuring out where those letters fall in our 100,000 or so genes, and precisely what each of these genes does, could take an additional 50 years...
Already, skirmishes have broken out between university-based researchers, many allied with the Human Genome Project, and small, aggressive firms like Celera, Incyte and Human Genome Sciences. These companies are churning out patent claims almost as fast as they sequence our DNA. In 1999 Celera filed provisionally on no fewer than 6,500 genes and their fragments...
Gene patents, to be sure, can be useful. Without them, the private sector wouldn't ante up the billions of dollars needed to drive biotechnology. But critics feel that far too many patents are being issued on DNA sequences whose commercial use is unclear. Though the Patent and Technology Office is trying to reduce the number of approvals it issues, no one doubts the courts will eventually have to step in. But now the rush is on to patent every gene in sight...