Word: venter
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...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...
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...
...Johns Hopkins Nobelist Hamilton Smith challenged Venter to do more. At the time, Venter was using a technique called shotgunning. In essence, shotgunning amounts to putting DNA into a chemical Cuisinart. High-frequency sound waves shred the long stringy molecule into tiny fragments. The fragments are cloned in bacteria, and then, following what has become standard gene-mapping procedure, the bugs are ripped open and their DNA is run through a gene-sequencing machine...
...torn into so many random bits of genetic gibberish (as opposed to the predictable fragments made by gene-cutting enzymes), scientists need powerful computers to determine where the tiny fragments overlap. This is tough enough when you're sequencing a small part of a chromosome. But now Smith urged Venter to try it out, not merely on a strip of DNA but on an entire genome. He proposed Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections and meningitis. Until then, only a few small viruses, whose genomes had tens of thousands of genetic letters, had been entirely decoded...