Word: projects
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Important as it was, the job would take some time. Unlike the atom bomb or the space race, there was no Hitler or Khrushchev who threatened to get there first. Without such external dangers forcing them to pull out all the stops, federally funded genome-project scientists figured they could move at their own pace; they would finish up in 2005 or thereabouts...
They figured wrong. The Nazis and the communists may be history, but an even more electrifying force has arisen to put the fear of God into the genome project: the profit motive. Pharmaceutical companies stand to make incalculable billions of dollars by turning genome research into new treatments for a dizzying array of diseases. And the companies that manage to get the information first--and lock up what they find with patents--will profit most...
Blindsided by Venter's surprise announcement, leaders of the federal genome project--which is being carried out at university and government labs in the U.S., at the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, England, and at facilities in Germany and Japan--spent the summer rethinking their schedule. The result: an announcement last fall that they would finish up by 2003 rather than 2005, with a rough "working draft" of the genome to be published...
...measured march to decode the human genome, in short, has turned into a headlong horse race--and the rivalry isn't always polite. The federal genome project, critics carp privately, has been shockingly mismanaged and is sorely lacking in vision. Private efforts, counter some in the public project, are pirate operations that seek to lock critical segments of God's genomic handiwork behind a barricade of patents. Beyond that, they say, speeding up the pace of discovery could lead to slapdash, incomplete results. "If this is the book of life," sniffs Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research...
Completeness and accuracy were the Human Genome Project's twin mantras from its formal start in 1990. At that point, researchers had already painstakingly identified more than 4,000 of the 100,000 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...