Word: venter
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Meanwhile, the threat of being upstaged by Venter has put enormous pressure on the Human Genome Project. During a previously scheduled project review last summer, the directors did a thorough re-evaluation of their procedures, soliciting advice from the scientists doing the actual mapping. In the end, the message was clear. Says Collins: "We heard from the users that our current degree of accuracy wasn't needed for many of their strategies...
...Venter wasn't finished, though. Last month it was revealed that the U.S. Department of Energy, whose labs are part of the federal project, was negotiating with Venter to let him do part of the job for it. The cost to the government: zero. That proposal was put on ice by project leaders, supposedly because the DOE had contracted with Venter without checking with other project members, and also out of fear that the release of information to the public might be delayed. Unofficially, it's clear that sour grapes over Venter's latest triumph played a role in their...
Whether it's Venter or the government or some sort of public-private partnership that eventually finishes the job, all the genome mappers agree that 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...
...will be far more useful in allowing us to see the real molecular basis of diseases--all diseases--whether it's multiple sclerosis or brain tumors or diabetes." The truth is that no one can predict exactly what breakthroughs might result from the deciphering of the human genome. As Venter puts it: "It's like it was before electricity. No one could have envisioned personal computers back then...
...star-studded crowd grooving to the sounds of Shotgun rocker Bruce Hornsby at a Gianni Versace mansion. But what was different about this party, thrown last September, was its guest list: 1,800 of the world's leading genomics experts drawn to Miami by a conference sponsored by Craig Venter, the enfant terrible of the gene hunters. Not everyone in the galaxy of genetics stars was there, however. Conspicuously absent was DNA co-discoverer James Watson, a former head of the federal Human Genome Project, who like other scientists in the field has had a long, troubled relationship with...