Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door kelt
(Bericht 3330168)
Die Craig Venter is de kerel die,als ik me niet vergis,in zijn kop gestoken had dat het in kaart brengen van het menselijk genoom wat sloom opschoot,op die manier waren "de specialisten"(universiteiten en aanverwante dichtgeslibte instituten) er nog decennia mee bezig.Met ongehoorde bezieling kreeg hij alle middelen en mensen bijeen(uit de privé notabene) en kijk eens aan,BINNEN een decennium is de kaart er al....
Misschien hebben we inderdaad dergelijke lui (en hun adresbakje) nodig om er weer eens een lap op te geven :|
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Het menselijk genoom is het resultaat van 3,5 miljard jaar evolutie. De persoonlijke bijdrage van meneer Venter in deze is onbestaande. Meneer Venter, uitstekend in zijn rol als verkoper, wekt de indruk de overheidsinspanningen te vlug af zijn geweest, maar dat is allesbehalve een uitgemaakte zaak.
BOEK:
BESPREKING:
The Common Thread is the story of the race to sequence the human genome. John Sulston, director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge and the Human Genome Project in the UK, and science journalist Georgina Ferry have produced a book with all the elements required to keep a reader happy: a good story, goodies and baddies, big money and big politics.
(...) Why did it matter so much? Because the private company, Celera, wanted to patent some of the sequences, which would mean that advances arising from the work, such as diagnostic tests and possibly even cures for certain inherited diseases, would be under their control. Their stated aim was to become ‘the definitive source of genomic and associated medical information.’ Jim Watson, coordinating the US government-funded sequencing effort, believed that Craig Venter, the head of Celera, ‘wanted to own the human genome the way Hitler wanted to own the world.’ Despite
attempts by Celera to persuade the US government to pull the plug on the publicly funded projects, the latter continued and at a faster pace. The scientists running these projects had agreed some years earlier that any sequence obtained that was believed to be reliable would be made available to anyone via the Internet. They felt that this was the best way to avoid any attempt to patent some of the sequences, a concept loathed by Sulston.
(...)
And biology had finally become politically important too;
both the US President, Bill Clinton, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, spoke at the press conferences held in Washington and London to announce that the draft sequence was complete. On that day in June 2000, Celera published its findings in Science and the publicly funded consortium published its findings in Nature. Most of us somehow got the impression that Celera had won the race, but it is made clear in the book that this is far from the truth. First, neither side at that stage was even claiming that they had more than 90% of the sequence and with Celera not even releasing their data, despite publication in Science, it was pretty hard to know how much they really had. What the authors conclude is that Celera was better at issuing press releases than the government-funded consortium.
(...)
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