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Mapping the Human Genome
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The greatest scientific accomplishment ever is almost complete. What could be a greater accomplishment than man on the moon? Only one thing comes to mind, mapping of the human genome. The human genome is 3.2 billion letters long. Ninety-seven percent of it is useless trash. The Human Genome Project was created a little over a decade ago. With the project coming to an end researchers will be able to figure out exactly how each gene functions--and, more important, malfunctions to trigger deadly illnesses from heart disease to cancer (Time 1999). There is a mad race to see who will finish first. A couple of companies are in the running to finish by 2003. Independently funded Celera Genomics Corp. is in first, closely followed by the Human Genome Project, which is funded by the US government, and behind the most powerful country in the world is The Sanger Centre in England. James Watson and others started the Human Genome Project in 1988. James Watson was also the co-discover of the structure of DNA. The human instruction book was thought to take fifteen years and three billion dollars, but the project is ahead of schedule and under budget. At first people felt that we weren’t ready for the start of the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project started off slow, but gained much momentum after key scientist and computers were involved. The Celera Genomics company is in the lead because Craig Venter the leading scientist of Celera. Pharmaceutical companies fund Celera Genomics Corp. The pharmaceutical companies back up Celera with funds so when Celera Genomics find genes they patent the genes. Which means the pharmaceutical companies will profit form their patents. Some say that patenting genes is wrong. If Celera finds the sequence that causes heart disease and another company wants to do research on heart disease they can’t, because Celera owns the genes and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Celera Genomics can sell the genes to the company, but it would cost the company millions of dollars for genes that aren’t Celera’s, just discovered by them. Craig Venter is known all around the world. Although other scientists hate him he is the most famous living scientist in the world today. The reason he is hated so much is because he uses robot research gene sequencers and high-speed computers in finding the genes. Other scientists argue that some of the data is not very accurate. Others call him a cheat for lifting data made public on the government’s GenBank website at tax payers expense—and then patenting sequences culled from this data, there by locking up information originally intended to be freely available (Time 2001). Many scientists also dislike him because he heads a company that patents genes for the company’s good. Venter argues that he will release the complete genome to the world when it is done for free.
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