Word: nih
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Freed from the confines of the NIH, Venter took an offer from a venture capitalist to head his own research facility, which he named The Institute for Genomic Research--TIGR, or "tiger." The private sector gave him the resources to find genes as fast as he could...
...together again, his basic premise, shared by the competition at Genset and Incyte, remains compelling: you don't need the entire genome mapped to high precision to make big advances. Cohen's discoveries of prostate-cancer genes are one example. Similarly, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of NIH's National Library of Medicine, is using databases of partial gene sequences to zero in on genes that make aberrant proteins in ailments like Parkinson's disease...
...pushed up from 2005 to 2003. And while project scientists had previously been unwilling to release data until they were of high quality, the administrators announced that they would offer up a "working draft" of only moderate precision by 2001. Says Mark Guyer, an assistant director with the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute: "These data are so rich, it's hard not to extract value from them." But, he admits, "it would not have happened had it not been for the Celera announcement...
...once the gene sequence is complete, the next step will be to look into how genes vary from one person to the next. In most diseases, it is probably a conspiracy of several genes and environmental factors that result in illness or death. Through its human-variation project, the NIH hopes to identify genes and sets of genes that only nudge people toward a particular disease...