Word: venter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...narrowly focused as their efforts are, Cohen and Scott are using gene-mapping techniques that are not very different from the Human Genome Project's. Craig Venter, on the other hand, has taken a radical approach, one that resembles paper shredding more than it does mapmaking...
...Venter's reputation as a creative thinker was made back in the late 1980s. He was studying genes at the National Institutes of Health when he came to a humbling realization: while the greatest minds in biochemistry still hadn't figured out how to locate a gene efficiently, cells do it all the time. Cells, moreover, tap into only those genes they need and ignore the rest...
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...
...them expressed sequence tags (ESTs)--to help scientists distinguish one gene from another and identify related genes even in other species. "His invention of ESTs was inspired," says Victor McKusick, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University who is often called the father of genetic medicine. In June 1991, when Venter published his first paper based on this work, scientists had identified only about 4,000 genes, each one representing years of painstaking labor. In one day, Venter added 347 new genes to the list. Soon he was finding...
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...