Word: dna
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...genes that serve as the blueprint for a functioning human being--each gene carrying instructions that tell cells how to produce a specific protein. Scientists had located about 1,500 genes, in a rough way, on the 46 chromosomes--the long, twisted strands of DNA cradled in protein at the heart of every human cell. But they had deciphered, or sequenced, only a handful of the many-hundred-word "sentences" that each gene represents--sentences made up of three-letter "words" built in turn from four available molecular "letters," represented...
...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...
That was fine with Venter, since the strips of DNA that are actually being used as blueprints for constructing a protein are where the action is. So Venter decided to concentrate on these active parts. He focused on the so-called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which ferries instructions from DNA over to the cell's protein-making machinery. This is the essence of the gene, and it was these stripped-down genetic instructions--copied into a more stable form known as cDNA--that he fed into an automated gene sequencer he'd acquired...
Officials at the National Institutes of Health were delighted that one of their own had struck the mother lode, and they rushed to patent Venter's genes. But across the NIH campus, James Watson, who had won a Nobel for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA and who was then running NIH's Human Genome Project, was outraged. This wasn't science, he insisted. "Virtually any monkey" could do that work, Watson fumed in the opening salvo of a battle that would rage for months--and which smolders to this day. To patent such abbreviated genetic material, said...