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The Hunkapiller Syndrome
This could be called the Hunkapiller Syndrome.
In the coming years, if he's lucky and gets better lawyers, Bill Gates is going to have a lot to say about software. Michael Hunkapiller is going to have a lot to say about humanity -- who's born and who isn't, who recovers from disease and doesn't, what kind of information we receive about our own lives and futures, and those of the people we care about.
Yet Gates is a household word, a much-hyped Millenial "visionary," a metaphor for the rise of computing and the new, allegedly global economy. But few outside the exploding genomics industry can identify Hunkapiller.
It was Hunkapiller's company, PE Biosystem, that designed the high-speed DNA sequencers used to unravel the human genome. And it was Hunkapiller who set up Celera Genomics (Celera sells genomic information) which, using 300 of the new meahines, was sequencing the human genome years ahead of the publicly financed Genome Project. In the same way Cisco created many of the systems that run the Net, PE Bioystems (about to change it's name back to Applied Bioystems) has become the leading supplier of equipment for the genomics industry, seizing at least two-thirds of the market for gene sequencers.
Despite one's celebrity and the other's low public profile, analysts often compare Gates and Hunkapiller. "Indeed, customers and competitors often refer to PE as the Microsoft of genomics equipment," reported The New York Times recently, "not only because of its commanding position but also for what they see as its aggressive tactics."
Great. The man responsible for the rapid evolution of the Human Genome Project is being likened to a person branded a predator, monopolist and a liar by a federal judge.
But in corporatist America, these traits are considered inevitable in a successful executive, if not actually admirable. With some notable exceptions, few express doubt publically that gene-marketing and sales should fall into corporate hands, unregulated by science or government.
Gene testing and mapping are proceeding far ahead of humanity's ability to prepare for it or consider it. As testing becomes increasingly common, individual humans are already overwhelmed by social, moral and philosophical questions. Researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have recounted how a woman who'd had ovarian cancer was tested for recently-isolated breast cancer-related gene mutations, mostly for the sake of her two adult daughters. But when she told them she tested positively for the cancer gene, her daughters were so upset they stopped speaking to her.
The Times reported earlier last week too that a young man in Washington State called his genetics counselor with a guilty conscience: several months earlier, he told her, he'd made a sperm donation. And while he knew he had an inheritable syndrome that causes heart trouble and, often, early death, he hadn't mentioned that to the sperm bank. Troubled, the counselor called the sperm bank and found that there had, indeed, been successful pregnancies with the man's sperm. She offered to counsel those families but doesn't know whether the sperm bank even passed along the information.
These anecdotes suggest all kinds of genomic dangers, from honest mistakes to medical mishaps to genetic terrorism. All of which, as genomic manipulation becomes accessible and common, could make their way into fertility clinics and sperm banks and into the general population.
Other complex issues are already arising from genetic research -- parents seeking "perfect baby" are being given the option of avoiding the conception of children with certain illnesses. On the surface, this is a significant escalation for humanity in the war against disease, yet there has been little public discussion of the moral and ethical considerations. Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
When the Genome Project was heralded in a White House ceremony, the President and others suggested the gene map would soon eradicate cancer, heart disease, even aging. And genomics surely will help cure and control disease. But this revolting hype has distracted the media and public from focusing on the host of Frankenstein-like issues the genomics industry will soon uncork.
This arguably makes Dr. Hunkapiller one of the most important men in the world, since his company controls most of the machinery that makes such mapping possible. It's hard to argue that Gates, for all his billions, will have a fraction of his influence. Cornering the code of the human genome is the kind of monopoly that makes Gates look like a street-corner vendor.
I am a firmware engineer in Applied Biosystems (formerly PE Biosystems). I was one of the people who developed the 3700 DNA analyzer, as well as a a couple of other instruments before this one.
Mike Hunkapiller is my boss's boss's boss's boss. Four levels. Compare to HP, Microsoft, or even Sun, and you will find that this is a very flat structure.
Hunkapiller sits in 2nd floor on one of the "Bay Towers" (the first two buildings you see on your right as you come west across the San Mateo bridge). In the floors above him are the software development and software product test teams. He sits in a cubicle, along with everyone else. He eats lunch in the cafeteria.
Those groups are going to move out of those buildings and onto the main campus (next to it), yielding more space for our neighbour, Inktomi. Instead, Applied Biosystems has just bought some property in Pleasanton. Mike Hunkapiller is currently lobbying for, and seeing if it is possible, for those people who live in the East Bay and want to work there to move to Pleasanton, and the remainder to stay on the main campus in Foster City.
You get the point. He has fostered a very informal, casual, and respectful culture in this company. People are allowed to enjoy themselves and to be Nice. :-) I.e. trusting, creative, personable. (Except IT, of course). The last employee survey showed that we had one of the highest motivated work force anywhere.
If he was Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison, or even Craig Venter (of Celera), he would be a lot more ego-driven. The company would be made into an image of his mind. We would have a lot more procedures, "employee agreements", and a lot less fun.
I have friends working both in Microsoft, Oracle, and Celera. I know what I'm saying here.
Sorry if I sound a bit exaggerative here. I do really like people like Hunkapillar, and there are plenty of them here. Even if they are a dying breed in corporate America at large.
Yes, Applied Biosystems dominates the market for DNA analyzers. It always has. That has nothing to do with "monopolistic practices" or such rubbish. Mike Hunkapiller, Leroy Hood, and a couple of others, invented electrophoresis scanning. The company has always had the edge, and always made the best equipment. People here want to do a good job. And it certainly has the best field support apparatus.
So, sorry JonKatz, but your sensationalist huff-puff upsettedness about the world (and anything that sounds like a suitable target for your "corporate America" label) is probably best applied to your own pidestal.
And iff you haff doubts about our genuine motifation to help mannkind, vee haff very effektif mezods off deelink witz you. Ve vill just allter your genes to make you look like ze monkey you are.
Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Great idea, Jon. Not everybody should be healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive? Are you saying that we should deliberately create sickly, miserable, idiotic, ugly people -- just to AMUSE the lucky ones? Are you saying that if we have the technology to make people's lives dramatically better, we should withhold it from some of them to add a little "flavor" for the rest of us?
I don't know who would resign their children to the fate of being the 21st century equivalent of circus freaks and court jesters -- but maybe you'd like those to be your kids, Jon.
-IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Other complex issues are already arising from genetic research -- parents seeking "perfect baby" are being given the option of avoiding the conception of children with certain illnesses. On the surface, this is a significant escalation for humanity in the war against disease, yet there has been little public discussion of the moral and ethical considerations. Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
First off, I won't get into the fact that sequencing genes is nothing more than effectively counting them. I'm not a genomics wizard but my Dad is (albeit Plant genetics, but, hey). It's an important first step, but this is more akin to the V2 rocket launches by Germany than it is landing on the moon. I suspect this is why nobody has heard of Professor What's-His-Face. That, and he's not the world's (2nd?) richest man, so your comparison sucks, Katz. IMHO, Biologists are too concerned with drawing pictures than looking at ways to engineer life, which is where this research is going. Bacteria are wonderful little machines, as are plants, and their power will be harnessed.
What I'm interested in is why people freak out when you concider applying this to your kids. The obvious one is to concieve many children - fertilize a lot of eggs - and then sequence the genomes and see what good 'ol mother nature did for you. I'd sign up for this in a second; I would not think twice (nor would my current SO) about aborting a clump of cells that is going to have a miserable existance, albeit by my standards, but I'm the one creating that life, not your diety of choice. YMMV.
The best comes when you think about a latter step; Changing the genes of your kids to make them better (tm). Looks don't bother me; The kids can look like their old man, he obviously found a mate. What about intelligence though? Contrary to popular belief, it's hundreds if not thousands of traits that combine to make a good whatever(Engineer, in this case). If I could give an edge here, I will. You're fooling yourself if you think this technology can be stopped, too - because it'll be done in some country, because there's a lot of interest in this.
I've always wondered what would make up for man stopping natural evolution - we're too successful, and it's too slow. I always thought eventually AI would come into the picture, but with the possiblilty of being able to engineer our genes in the next 25 years, maybe government will be bright enough to let us make choices for how we want our offspring be.
Mind you, this tech isn't going to be cheap. But, I'd rather leave my kids improved genetic code (resistance to Cancer, maybe?) than a big chunk of money when I die. That might even be worth saving up for.
Kudos.
..don't panic
First thing you have to consider when making such analogies is that the market of PE and Microsoft is very, very different. It is a little harder to fool a scientist then it is to fool someone buing a home computer. You know, you tell one of them scientist fellas "this is 100% better" and he asks you what did you use as a negative control and where did you submit the paper with the detailed descriptions of experiments. And when you tell him, he actually goes to the library to read the paper, and maybe repeats one or two of the experiments, usually demanding a trial period for your machine or a sample of the chemicals. (Some even say, they do not buy chemicals at all, with all that company representatives in the house. But I'm digressing.)
You keep in mind your goal, you stay in touch with other people using the same techniques, you read a lot. My institute bought recently a quite expensive machine for so-called real time PCR; there are three companies producing such machines, and PE is one of them. Getting opinion, testing the machines, reading etc - I even was to two workshops - took a couple of months before we bought the PE machine. Funny thing is, it had definitely the worse marketing: everybody seems to know about another one, by Roche, which is called LightCycler, and has a mega-cool design, crossed with some piece of a futuristic ST device. PE machine is computer-ivory, takes more space, looks very old-fashioned and you can hardly spot any advertisments for it. It is not much better then the other one and definitely has some weak points (software, for example, is very crappy), but it seems much more -- reliable.
And that's the point about PE. They have a good opinion due to two things. First, the know-how: they are good at it. Technical support which I encountered was always exactly what the name says it is, and the workshop was excellent (however, that by Roche was not bad either, and definitely much more splendid). The other one is, the machines are really, really good. We have one PCR machine that has been working without any problems for the last ten years. A whole genome was sequenced with that single machine (admittedly, the genome is about 3750 times smaller then the human genome, but 1996 it was the seventh or so genome sequenced). PE PCR machines are quite expensive, so now we are using two by Eppendorff, but if we had that dough...
On the other thing, they are agressive, definitely. And I hate that thing with Celera, which is, IMO, the worst way of doing science. And I don't like anything that is set out only for money (as opposed, for example, to the university, which is set out only for making lives of some grown-up childrens more interesting and buy them more toys. Like, for example, a real time PCR machine). But PE is far, far away from being a monopolist, and the quality of their products is very high. So they are as far from MS as it is only possible for a large, international company (international? did I say international? You want to hear something about MS polish language support?).
Best regards,
January
Could you fault this person for choosing not to have children?
To put it differently, if your parents had chosen not to conceive you, perhaps for career reasons, or whatever, would that really be so callous? Would it be murder, akin to abortion or to abandoning you on a hillside once born? Is it wrong for anyone to choose not to have as many children as they possibly can, since they are denying life to the ones who could have been conceived?
There is a mighty difference between saying "I choose not to have children" and saying "I wish I had never had my children".
exactly - Katz's article is completely subjective and unimportant. How many of our lives are currently affected by computers? How many of our lives are currently affected by high-speed gene sequencers?
I'm not downplaying the imporance of gene research at all, but is it really suprising that we don't know who this guy is? No - the average american doesn't need to care about it. If I run up to some schmoe on the street and ask him who Larry Wall is, I'm not likely to get a correct answer...but Larry Wall's work has been extremely important to me and that's why I know who he is. But then again, I also don't know the names of people who are working on the computer languages that I may use in the future. Sure, we may benefit from gene research in the future, but not presently.
Katz, in order for Americans to keep up-to-date on what you think is important, they would have to read the same journals and magazines and web sites that you do.
Katz - do you know the names of the pioneers in the field of alternate energy? Probably not...amazing, really, because in a few years, fossil fuels are going to run out and, as far as I'm concerned, that's a really important field of research.
Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
this kind of uninformed writing (in journalism and advertising alike) was despised enough by hackers that they invented an acronym to classify it -- FUD. the posts that are represented here, with talk of "perfect babies" and "playing God" and such foolishness speak of a community that obviously is not armed for rational discussion of a serious issue.
there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
it is true that as we probe deeper into the heart of nature, we progressively become more of a danger to ourselves. but with this loss of innocence, we become closer to finally being masters of our own lives, and to really understanding our place in the working of all things.
"perfect babies" (i also saw this post elsewhere). you know, you perform your own kind of genetic engineering when you pick a mate with whom to breed -- selected for physical and intellectual attributes which you hope to preserve (albeit in a crude, haphazard kind of way) along with your own traits in subsequent generations. to be able to augment that kind of selection with the ability to delete disease causing genes -- that's great.
sure, there will (eventually) be people who blow a considerable amount of money making their children into blonde-haired, blue-eyed (there is nothing wrong with blonde hair and blue eyes) little volleyball players, but really, for every three or for dozen of those children, someone with real vision is going to have a child who is genetically predisposed for intelligence, wit, and compassion. and against even a handful of such children, those "perfect babies" don't stand a chance for survival. And aside from all of that, my guess is that most people will still elect to reproduce the old fashioned way.
Oh yeah... about the article itself. Having the genetic sequence is like having a billion page book that is written at odd patches in french, spanish, german, bengali, english, and swahili; and worse yet, the book actually contains about one million different storylines, the sentences of which are all woven in and around each other. We have no way of understanding or using this information, and the common conception that there is some gene that controls this or that feature of a person is just plain wrong. for a bare handful of traits, this is true; but many genes code in different combinations with many other genes for widely disparate information, the grouping of which often seems lacking in serious rhyme or reason. And the interpretation of all of that kind of information will take more than superfast computers -- it will take decades of cleverly designed experiements and careful research.
so everyone quit whining and stewing, read that copy of "Future Shock" one more time, and work on teaching yourselves and your children to live responsibly in a world where you might have to have questions about yourself answered that you wouldn't even think to ask. We should work on making ourselves worthy of this kind of power, rather than fearing it, because it is inevitable.
Stop making these people out to be cartoon villains or heroes. The real answer to your question is that being famous is irrelevant to issues of public concern. You seem to be saying that fame or infamy is a measure of one's importance to society. While it may be true that infamous people are well-known, the actual reasons for their infamy are far more important than their 'top-of-mind' rating in focus groups. As others have pointed out, genetics has been widely discussed for several years. People are already aware of the issues -- they only need data to help them understand the risks and benefits of genetic engineering, and you haven't provided any. If you think Hunkapiller should be more famous, perhaps you should get him an agent.