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does that mean that bio-tech companies could concievably hold patents on YOUR body?

Where have you been? You must have missed that whole debate. I'm sorry to inform you that you are already owned, by a number of private companies, and some research groups. The leading owner of you is, Incyte
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Now I'm not a bio-tech geek but I'll try to explain. Your genes are stored in the nucleus of your cells. Genes are composed of DNA. In order to make a protein, a section of your DNA is copied into RNA in a process called transcription. (think of it as copying and pasting a section of code) The RNA is then transported out into little protein factories in your cells and the information contained in the RNA is translated into a protein sequence. (think of translating as changing the code from Perl to C) Proteins are encoded differently than genes so there is a translation process to get the information from one to the other.

Now to get back on topic, there are about 30,000 or so genes in the human body and there are effectively 3 gene transcripts for each gene due to the transport mechanism. Coincidentally this number is about 100,000. So what people are getting confused about is that someone didn't understand the difference between a gene transcript and a gene.

Ultimately understanding gene transcripts and how they form proteins will ultimately be much more important in creating therapies for diseases.

Imagine if there were no patents granted for genes. Do you really think that research would stop? Way to get my goat this morning! That and the fact that I submitted a very similar story more than a week ago, before the public announcement, even.

Well, lemme paraphrase what I submitted (*sigh*): it is even deeper than 'combinations' of genes. The word 'proteomics' may become bigger than the word 'genomics' as scientists discover that the array of proteins and the enzymes they create are more responsible for the differences in our make-up than the genes that merely create them. One might say that it's the products of the software, and not the hardware that constitutes the individual. I don't know much more about this subject, but would love to hear from someone who does understand this. If any of you seven or eight individuals are reading this, can you please elaborate for us? That would be great!

Oh, there is an interesting, if a little technical, link on Proteomics here. Check out the tour.

This is not to say that I support gene patenting.. but I believe the reason for it is to provide an incentive for companies to research genes.

For inventions that require a lot of work up front (for example the internal combustion engine), patents work well because you know that after the patent is granted you can recoup (some of) your investment. The work required to apply for a gene patent is routine these days, which is why companies like Celera and Incyte can easily swamp the patent office with thousands of gene patent applications. A gene patent application will generally state what function the gene is thought to have, but normally that will be a computer prediction with no experimental backup. Once the patent is granted and if the company thinks there is a chance that the gene will make them money later the long and difficult laboratory work will start. The "if" in the last sentence is a big if.

If there was no such thing as a gene patent, then it would probably be much longer before we got a cure for cancer and whatever other genetic diseases there are.

Summary: Getting a patent on a gene is (relatively) easy, doing the laboratory work to develop a drug is (relatively) hard. Under the current system companies can get a patent before doing anything difficult. Meanwhile everyone else finds it more difficult to the challenging and expensive part because patents keep getting in the way.

It's not just shooting up mice and Mad Cow Disease- all those biotech people are clamoring for more computing power. But now that they've sequenced the whole human genome, does our pal J. Craig at Celera really know what to do with more computing power? I'd give dollars to donuts that he'd waste it on a UT server, while people like Stephen Mayo and his research group at CalTech are drooling over power like this.

Hot biotech now isn't about sequencing the genome, it's trying to decide what to do with the sequence now that there is a blueprint to work from. Thus companies like Incyte Genomics and Sangamo Biosciences are making money selling tools to build on or manipulate the structure we already have.

A machine running code that will reliably predict the actual folded tertiary structure of the unique protein that derives from any known sequence of DNA is the holy grail of biotech today. Maybe this IBM box (or should I call it a house?) is a step in that direction.

Being a biotech guy, I am interested in the use of Beowulf-style clusters for DNA sequence alignments and searches, etc. Incyte Corp. and Volker Brendel at Iowa state already use Linux clusters, because their architecture is great for simultaneously aligning lots of different DNA sequences...I suppose forecasting gleams similar benefits. In what cases would a cluster be an inappropriate and/or inefficient soloution to a massive computational problem? When would you have to use a Cray or other big monolithic vector rig?

I find a bit ridiculous to ban patenting on genes and not on proteins. Most genes become proteins and most drugs work on protein. Everyone will patent more proteins instead of genes. It's not as simple as that, I know, but still.