Slashdot Mirror

greenplato writes "Thirty billion base pairs from the sequences of humans, mice, and rats that were available only by subscription to Celera's DNA database are being put into the public domain. Celera will donate this information to a 'federally run database,' presumably GenBank. Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, notes that 'data just wants to be public.' Stories in BusinessWeek and The New York Times."

Venture$cience writes: "Fresh from his arguably successful sequencing of the human genome with his company Celera Genomics, Craig Venter is now entering the field of global warming. Specifically, he is readying an ocean wide expedition to harvest novel forms of bacteria from the ocean's deep. From these collections he hopes to find bacteria that excel at converting CO2 into proteins, sugars, and methane. The current candidate for an atmospheric "scrubber" is the ancient Archae family of bacteria that is believed to have helped modify the early Earth's original atmosphere. This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?"

Nepre writes: "Forbes.com is running a story about new research that suggests that the Human Genome Project may have missed tens of thousands of genes in the race to map the human genome. This is interesting given the intense competition between commercial and academic research. As my grandmother used to say, "The faster you go, the behinder you get!""

It's the scientific achievment of our generation; what can you say about the mapping of the human genome? But here's a story behind the story. parvati turned us on to this NYT article about James Kent, who wrote the gene assembly program GigAssembler last June. It turns out that, thanks to his code, the public Human Genome Project had actually finished its work three days before the private effort by Celera Genomics -- a feather in their cap and a boon to public science. The head of Celera was "astonished" to learn of this grad student's genius -- ten thousand lines of C in a month, and why? -- "because of his concern that the genome would be locked up by commercial patents if an assembled sequence was not made publicly available for all scientists to work on." (The debate over public vs. private science continues to rage; see this Seattle P-I article, which discusses among other things the ethics of NDA'ing scientific data produced for profit.)

Update: 02/13 02:26 PM by J : Thanks to tlunde for finding the link to GigAssembler and thus clarifying which language it was written in.

Fact-o-matic writes: " Compaq, government weapons facility Sandia National Laboratories and genetics researcher Celera Genomics are teaming up to build a petaflop computer -- one that will process 1,000 trillion operations per second. To listen to an audio playback of today's press conference announcing the project, Celera has set up a phone-in recording: call (800) 642-1687, and enter the conference ID: 818790 You can read the joint press release or the Compaq press release"

In "one of the most petty and ridiculous issues ever in the history of science" - according to the guilty company's chief scientific officer - federal officials noticed that when Celera uploaded genetic sequences of the fruit fly to a public database, there was some human DNA mixed in. It's now been removed, and everyone seems to think this is not a very significant error. But the harsh exchange and defensive posturing on both sides underscores the edgy rivalry between the government group's slow-and-steady approach and Celera's "shotgun" approach to mapping the human genome. This story is also important because mixing human genes into a fly's genes is freaky cool - someone should make a movie about that.

Anonymous Coward writes "A British trust has warned Celera Genomics that data from Human DNA should remain in the public domain to maximize benefits for medical research. Celera is about to patent DNA structures after decoding about one third of the human genome. The Wellcome Trust is leading moves to stop the information becoming the private property of corporations. " Celera has been brute-forcing structures, enabling them to beat The Human Genome Project to the punch - and are filing for 6000 patents. Please contact the Wellcome Trust to indicate your support of them. Patent attempts like Celera's stifle scientific progress.Update: 10/26 10:00 by H :Thanks to net_shaman for the pointer to a similar article in The Washington Post.

The Dodger writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK and US Goverments are planning an agreement to prevent the 100,000 human genes being patented by private companies. Apparently, various bio-technology and drugs companies, such as Celera, are planning to patent the genes. Luckily, thus far, the UK's Wellcome Trust and the US National Institute of Health have been making each gene public as they are discovered. I think we should start a 'Keep the Human Genome Open Source' campaign." Software patents seem screwy enough, but I've never understood how anyone could have gall enough to patent a gene they merely discovered and didn't create. Or how governments could be dumb enough to issue gene patents, unless they are meant purely as welfare for lawyers, because that is surely what they will become.