Slashdot Mirror

Well, trusts are quite standard. Nothing to do with fraud. Almost all charities are set up as trusts. I presume you then think that they are bunch of fraudsters? Here's one. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ You could always accuse them of fraud. Pensions. Are the people saving in a pension a bunch of fraudsters? http://www.thepensionlawyer.com/pension_trusts.htm OK, remove the trust. Then as soon as someone has the misfortune to go on welfare, we can take their pensions. Someone goes bankrupt for whatever reason, say illness, you can take their pensions. Or they get into financial trouble, you can take their pensions and put them onto welfare. Lots of things can be legal entitities and not be a person. Companies can go to court, trusts can, people can. All can own things. What's the problem or is it that you want other people's money, or other companies money for your own purposes?

I wonder how true that is. Not that this is his brain nor that he revolutionized physics. I just wonder if THIS is the brain that did it.

You see, London has a strenuous test for Taxi drivers. Their streets are not like New York, where many are numbered in sequential order and relatively easy to learn. London has 25,000 roads, with no real rhyme or reason, and perspective taxi drivers - to get licensed - needs to memorize them and takes several years. The test is called the Knowlege, iirc, and it takes an average of a dozen attempt to pass:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/12/08/acquiring-the-knowledge-changes-the-brains-of-london-cab-drivers/

The hippocampus of these drivers is substantially larger and stay so throughout their working life. But it shrinks back down after retirement:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/75th-anniversary/WTVM052023.htm

This is Einsteins brain after, what, 40 some years after his best achievement? Is it the same brain anymore? Wouldn't it be like poking at the Schwarzenegger's remains whenever he dies to see what makes a bodybuilder at his peak? Just something to ponder.

Actually, just to keep this in focus here, it doesn't take a lot of genetic difference to cause this.

Fact: Lactose Intolerance.

Ooo, Ooo! - Fact:Broccoli haters!

No they will not patent this. The work was done by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute that is funded (unsurprisingly) by the Wellcome Trust which is a big medical research charity. The Sanger Institute releases all of its research into the public domain.

I'd rather they concentrate their efforts on biological warfare.

What I said before:

While I support embryonic stem cell research, I don't support taxpayer money supporting it. Reduce taxes and let those who want ESC research donate money.

While I do no support government funding of research I don't oppose it either. I'd rather government reduce tax and let others pay for research. Only as a last effort should government fund research. But when government does fund it then the research should be open sourced so anyone could use it.

There is very rarely any corporate funding for something that CAN'T BE PATENTED

Corporations aren't the only ones that fund research. Universities fund research as well. So do charities and non profits. Others fund St Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which then funds research. Before he died Danny Thomas put his heart and soul into starting and supporting St Jude's, as does his daughter Marlo Thomas.

Falcon

Its true currently an average of 50% of adults are seropositive for HSV1, but as an individual statistics state 80% - 85% of people over the age of 60 are infected, so odds are slim you will avoid being inflicted with the HSV1 virus (cold sores)before you die. However with the advances being made in understanding the virus' ability to reactivate and stay hidden, drugs will most likely be developed within the next ten years that destroy the virus' ability to replicate making it almost entirely non-contagious, and within twenty years we'll have a technique/drug that will be capable of killing it where it hides in the trigeminal ganglion located in the brain, which extends to the face/lips. However newer research is indicating that not just HSV1, but a large host of viruses previously thought to be harmless (such as other members of the HSV family Cytomegalovirus & Epstein-Barr virus) eventually cause build up of plaque in the brain causing cognitive decline, particularly combined with the ApoE4 gene variation, which I believe this study linking HSV1 & Alzheimer's is referring to. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/541533 http://genome.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX038956.html

I was thinking the exact same thing. I didn't realize that men and women have different genomes. According to this page

"Surprisingly, a male genome is not the same as a female genome â" and it even appears that genomes may be engaged in a genetic 'tug of war' within a developing embryo."

It continues saying

"An example is the insulin-like growth factor system, which has a strong influence on the size of a baby. The logic is that the paternal genome works to maximise the growth of the offspring, to give it the best chance of survival when it is born. The maternal genome, though, protects the mother, so she can go through further pregnancies. Male and female genomes may be constantly battling with one another, driven by evolutionary pressures to ensure that their genes survive and spread."

Additionally, I found this blog post and I quote

"Willard and Carrel's work has focused largely on x chromosome inactivation, and the way in which this expresses itself in between-and-within sex phenotypes. Hotz quotes Willard: "In essence, there is not one human genome, but two: male and female."
As discussed in a previous post, Steven Pinker (2005) theorizes that there is greater variation in ability in males; basically, that males are the guinea pigs for evolutionary change. This is part of Pinker's explanation of why men are overrepresented at the highest levels of achievement. Critics such as Chabris and Glickman (2006) have attempted to disprove this using examples such as chess achievement, but Hotz suggests that Willard and Carrel's research may have found genetic evidence to the contrary: "Females can differ from each other almost as much as they do from males in the way many genes at the heart of sexual identity behave."

One last article, I promise :) But I find this stuff pretty interesting as I never realized there was a difference:

"Analysis of the "X" chromosome - the female sex chromosome - has revealed that women are genetically more complicated than men. The findings reveal that men have taken a genetic battering that has dwindled the size of their own "Y" chromosome.
The battle of the sexes has its roots in a 300-million-year struggle between the X and the Y chromosomes which have vied with each other for influence over successive generations of males and females. Scientists showed yesterday that the X chromosome has retained its physical integrity while the Y of men has dwindled in size and power to become a shadow of its former self."

Now I am definitely oversimplifying this, but it seems the X and Y chromosome play a pretty big part in the difference. Odd how I never put 2 and 2 together. But if this has been known for so long, why hasn't anyone taken the time to map out a female genome before? Breast cancer is a pretty obvious female specific disease, so it strikes me odd that if the human genome has been mapped out since 2003 that no one has done this before.

Right, because private enterprise never funds pure science...

You're unlikely to replicate the research large drug companies do in academia.

The good folk at The Wellcome Trust might disagree with you there.

And unlike purely commercial entities, and while they do commercialise some of their efforts, they aren't trying to extract as much profit as possible like Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca are.

Bottom line: Drug companies have to make a profit. They have to recover costs

Drug companies DO have to make a profit, but to say that this is to recoup their R&D costs is a little naive. These companies must return a substantial profit for their shareholders. R&D is simply a means to an end, and that end is shareholder value.

Non-profit entities (as nicely detailed in TFA) are quite able to make great advances in medical science without the requirement for profit.

Pharmaceutical companies could then strive to manufacture these "open" drugs in as an efficient way as possible, in an effort to compete with other manufacturers. This competitiveness would give us, the public cheap, quality drugs, and allow the manufacturing companies to make a profit.

This is capitalism as it should be. This is medicine as it should be.

(not a reply intended for the original poster, who likely knows all this already)

Since the advent of the internet/WWW and high-quality desktop printing have made mailed-out paper journals less necessary, a number of free "open access journals" have recently arisen. A number of others are making content free a couple of months after publication.

The idea is that cost should not prohibit anyone from accessing scientific information, whether that person is an undergraduate in London or a professor in Nairobi.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/

http://www.wsis-si.org/oa-facts.html

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node3302.html

More links to the pile

Oragenics (Genetically Modified Replacement)
More than a mouthfull

Apparently, medical companies are in a rush to find protein structures that may lead to medical developments and patent them wildly.
The Welcome Trust funds several projects around the world that try and find as many structures before they are patented, and release them to public domain.
The way they do it is by massive trial and error. They test many environments for crystallization in parallel using robots and some neat tech.

Well the nice thing about the Wellcome Trust is that they are an independent charity and the largest non-corporate non-governmental source of biomedical research funding in the UK.

Maybe you'd like to read their constitution: here

Sure theres a chance that things can get tied up in the hands of companies - but lets look at the human genome project. The best data came out of the academic sector, the private data (held by Celera) didn't turn out to be too profitable after all (or even better quality) and is now in the public domain. I worry about the commercialisation of science as much as the next man, but lets face it, business just doesn't care unless there's a drug to sell at the end. Data is still just data.

Here's the article (by the Wellcome Trust) Mitochondrial DNA and human history

Tracing the early history of the human colonization of Europe beginning about 45 000 years ago has been another success story for mDNA, proving that most Europeans trace their ancestry to hunter-gatherers who arrived during the last Ice Age, rather than farmers coming from the Middle East. And also that the Neanderthals have left no trace in the European gene pool and almost certainly became extinct.

Among native Europeans, almost everybody can trace their maternal genealogy, using mDNA, to one of only seven women, their ancient clan mother. To give them an identity I have given these women names: Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine. The women lived between 10 000 and 45 000 years ago, six of the seven were hunter-gatherers, the seventh, Jasmine, was an early farmer. These seven women are also related to each other, and these connections can also be followed by mDNA. They join up with the clan mothers from other parts of the world and ultimately coalesce in one woman - mitochondrial Eve, who lived in Africa about 150 000 years ago. Wherever we live on the planet, we are all her descendants.

Bryan Sykes is Professor of Human Genetics at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford.

Nice Troll... I'll bite.
From their "About Us" page:

The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health.

Established in 1936 and with an endowment of around £10 billion, it is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.

As a privately endowed charity, we are independent from governments, from industry and from donors.

The governing document of the Wellcome Trust is its constitution. This represents an updated version of the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, through which the Wellcome Trust was established in 1936. Ultimate responsibility for our activities lies with our Board of Governors.

They removed most of the DNA from lab mice and produced living, healthy mice with no apparent side effects.

Most? 3% of the genome doesn't seem like "most". "Some", maybe.

Sorry, there is no private funding of Beagle 2. It has been paid for as a consortium by the Department of Trade and Industry, ESA, the Wellcome Trust and PPARC. The involvement of Damien Hirst and Blur has been on a volunteer basis - both for their contributions and for the publicity they can give the project.

Best wishes,
Mike.

According to this , the human body has 100 trillion cells. So I could mark each of my cells 129,099 times. (I wonder how many atoms per cell? Perhaps I could mark all my atoms...)

Sounds like a good-sized number. Too bad they didn't make a protocol out of it, though, so things could send a header (including length of subsequent data), etc. But then we get into price/performance...

I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done
in the private sector.

You will be pleased to learn that the your government didn't pay for the sequencing of chromosome 20. It was paid for by the Wellcome Trust which is a British charity.