Indeed. Gordon Brown appointed Jacqui Smith and she implements government policy. When those polices are popular with Middle England, the government claims credit. If the policies aren't
popular, she will be blamed and the policies forgotten. If the policies are very unpopular, she will be moved to
a minor cabinet post or to the back benches. Appointment to the post of Home Secretary tends to be a career limiting move.
I do not see the Muslim world condemning terrorism at all.
Stop watching Fox News and try actually speaking to some Muslims.
"God told me to do it" is not a valid excuse.
It works for Bush.
They should have fired the Imam...
Which "they" do you mean?
Re:With that last question I ask another
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
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· Score: 1
Why is it that non-Americans hate the US so much, yet it is always the United States cleaning up everyone else's spilled milk, as so to speak?
Because (rightly or wrongly), most non-Americans think that in the last 50 years the US has done more to make the world a worse place to live than any other single country. (Hint: most non-Americans live in Asia, Africa or South America.)
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.
I think you should reconsider moving to either Italy or France. As a high-wage earner,
your taxes will be excessive
This isn't the case if you are doing contract work. In many European countries you can get away with paying no income tax if you
are an overseas resident. You will have to pay for your own health insurance etc. but you will still do well.
Too bad there isn't a way to make an e-mail address that crashes a spambot. It would be nice to have
the spammers have to work a bit harder to get addresses at all.
No gene patents != no drug development
on
Squatting On Life
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· Score: 2
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.
Gene patents are allowed for the same reasons as other patents, the company
gets a limited monopoly in the hope that they will be encouraged to invest
more in research. However, the current patent system works very poorly in the
field of biotechnology.
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.
That isn't at all certain. If the company can't see a way to make money
directly, they will often put the patent to one side. They can afford to do
that because compared to the cost of developing a drug (tens or hundreds of
millions of dollars), one gene patent is cheap (tens of thousands). Because
they are so cheap, the biotech companies are rushing to stake their claims
without knowing which genes are the most important or valuable. And while a
company holds a patent on a gene that all other companies and research
institutions find it difficult (or impossible) to do work on the same gene.
This is especially difficult for academic institutions where people are doing
fundamental research rather than working on a particular disease.
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.
Such a language exists, it is called Objective Caml. One thing only is missing, the most important one, the installed basis.
The other thing that is missing is a good license. The OCaml compiler currently uses the Q Public License, which means modified versions can only be distributed as patches.
(BTW. I agree that OCaml is an excellent language).
Why haven't they been heard of until now? Publicity directly leads to venture capital; there is no reason why a company would try to stay as secret as that. This whole thing even smells kind of a like a hoax; they had nothing to gain and money to lose by keeping it secret.
If you read about the company you will see that they been around for a while and have $66 million in venture funding. It is also worth saying that the work DoubleTwist does (gene finding) tends to be cheaper than the work Celera does (sequencing), so funding is less of an issue.
The value of Doubletwist's database is exactly as you've analyzed, but for smaller biotech firms, it's worth it -- because this type of bioinformatics service is quite expensive right now, due to a lack of people who are capable of doing it.
There are public projects that are working to provide this sort of service for free. Ensembl is one example.
A fact that has often been overlooked or questioned in the press accounts of this venture is that an essential feature of the new company's business plan is to provide public availability of the sequence data.
[snip]
It is our plan to release data into the public domain at least every 3 months including the complete human genome sequence at the end of the project.
Celera has never made a release of it's human sequence data, so they must have started their work less than three months ago. The media are obviously mistaken when they report that Celera started sequencing in September last year.
BTW the human genome project got a bit of support yesterday from the U.S. Senate,
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Gordon Brown appointed Jacqui Smith and she implements government policy. When those polices are popular with Middle England, the government claims credit. If the policies aren't popular, she will be blamed and the policies forgotten. If the policies are very unpopular, she will be moved to a minor cabinet post or to the back benches. Appointment to the post of Home Secretary tends to be a career limiting move.
None, I hope. They didn't make the movie or write the story.
Because (rightly or wrongly), most non-Americans think that in the last 50 years the US has done more to make the world a worse place to live than any other single country. (Hint: most non-Americans live in Asia, Africa or South America.)
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.
http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/databases/DOGS/abbr_table.b
These pages show how much of each organism is finished and publically available:
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~sterk/genome-MOT/MOTgraph.h
http://www3.ebi.ac.uk/Services/DBStats/
25000 genes is near the low end of the range for the estimates of the number of genes in the human genome:
http://www.ensembl.org/Genesweep/
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.
That isn't at all certain. If the company can't see a way to make money directly, they will often put the patent to one side. They can afford to do that because compared to the cost of developing a drug (tens or hundreds of millions of dollars), one gene patent is cheap (tens of thousands). Because they are so cheap, the biotech companies are rushing to stake their claims without knowing which genes are the most important or valuable. And while a company holds a patent on a gene that all other companies and research institutions find it difficult (or impossible) to do work on the same gene. This is especially difficult for academic institutions where people are doing fundamental research rather than working on a particular disease.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.
(BTW. I agree that OCaml is an excellent language).
If you read about the company you will see that they been around for a while and have $66 million in venture funding. It is also worth saying that the work DoubleTwist does (gene finding) tends to be cheaper than the work Celera does (sequencing), so funding is less of an issue.
There are public projects that are working to provide this sort of service for free. Ensembl is one example.
Craig Venter has promised this (on June 17, 1998 to the U.S. Congress):
[snip]Celera has never made a release of it's human sequence data, so they must have started their work less than three months ago. The media are obviously mistaken when they report that Celera started sequencing in September last year.
BTW the human genome project got a bit of support yesterday from the U.S. Senate,