They have been considered. One of the big problems is that they tend to require large power sources, which with battery operated robots makes your duration nil.
All this announcement shows is the public is naive and politicians like to take credit for things that have already been done. The data from the human genome project IS and ALWAYS has been freely available. The DOE is funding most of the current research. Therefore the information is in the public domain because its government funded research. All you need to do is go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/ and there you have it... complete and total access to all the genetic code you could possibly want.
What is more likely is that this announcement is in response to Celera Genomics claim to be able to sequence the entire genome in less then a year. The government is probably jealous that Celera is trying to take their fire. Lets face it the first group (being government funded or privately funded) to sequence of the genome is going to get some serious PR.
By the way did any one notice Celera's stock dropped 20% the same day the announcement was made?
Additionally the claim that any one group could ever "control" the genome is unfounded. The information in the genome cannot be patented. In order to patent a gene you must know something about that gene's function... just managing to get the complete sequence of a gene is simplistic. There are undergraduates and high school students that are in essence cloning genes. What the government is doing is not magical or mystical. Its simple. It just takes a large amount of time and resources.
Perhaps this is a big deal... just not to those of use who have known about it since the genome project started in the early 1990's.
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They have been considered. One of the big problems is that they tend to require large power sources, which with battery operated robots makes your duration nil.
All this announcement shows is the public is naive and politicians like to take credit for things that have already been done. The data from the human genome project IS and ALWAYS has been freely available. The DOE is funding most of the current research. Therefore the information is in the public domain because its government funded research. All you need to do is go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/ and there you have it... complete and total access to all the genetic code you could possibly want.
What is more likely is that this announcement is in response to Celera Genomics claim to be able to sequence the entire genome in less then a year. The government is probably jealous that Celera is trying to take their fire. Lets face it the first group (being government funded or privately funded) to sequence of the genome is going to get some serious PR.
By the way did any one notice Celera's stock dropped 20% the same day the announcement was made?
Additionally the claim that any one group could ever "control" the genome is unfounded. The information in the genome cannot be patented. In order to patent a gene you must know something about that gene's function... just managing to get the complete sequence of a gene is simplistic. There are undergraduates and high school students that are in essence cloning genes. What the government is doing is not magical or mystical. Its simple. It just takes a large amount of time and resources.
Perhaps this is a big deal... just not to those of use who have known about it since the genome project started in the early 1990's.