Posted on 10/09/2006 9:54:44 PM PDT by annie laurie
Washington, DC (AHN) - In what could be the largest medical prize in history, the X-Prize Foundation says $10 million is up for grabs to the first private team that decodes 100 human genomes in 10 days.
The organizers believe rapid genetic sequencing is the next great frontier, and could pave the way for a new era of personalized medicine.
It could allow doctors to measure patients' vulnerability to illness and genetic connections to diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's.
This is the second major challenge from the foundation, which also sponsored the $10 million prize to the team who developed the private manned spacecraft SpaceShipOne in 2004.
Currently it costs millions of dollars and many months to sequence an individual's genome, encoded in DNA reports BBC.
Dr. J Craig Venter, one of the members of the X-Prize's scientific advisory board, said, "We need a database of millions of human genomes to help us fully decipher the nature and nurture aspects of human existence."
After the competition, the winning team will be asked to decode the genetic sequences of the "Genome 100." It is a group of celebrities, benefactors and members of the public that include Dr. Stephen Hawking, CNN's Larry King, and Anousheh Ansari.
bump, good find
Venter spent millions or billions of other people's money so he would know to take fat fighting meds. Other folks get fired for surfin' the web at work.Scientist Reveals Genome Secret: It's HimWhen scientists at Celera Genomics announced two years ago that they had decoded the human genome, they said the genetic data came from anonymous donors and presented it as a universal human map. But the scientist who led the effort, Dr. J. Craig Venter, now says that the genome decoded was largely his own. Dr. Venter also says that he started taking fat-lowering drugs after analyzing his genes... [M]embers of Celera's scientific advisory board expressed disappointment that Dr. Venter subverted the anonymous selection process that they had approved... Though the five individuals who contributed to Celera's genome are marked by separate codes, Dr. Venter's is recognizable as the largest contribution. He said he had inherited from one parent the variant gene known as apoE4, which is associated with abnormal fat metabolism and the risk of Alzheimer's, and that he was taking fat-lowering drugs to counteract its effects... Dr. Arthur Caplan, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "Any genome intended to be a landmark should be kept anonymous. It should be a map of all us, not of one, and I am disappointed if it is linked to a person."
Scientist Reveals Genome Secret: It's Him
by Nicholas Wade
April 27, 2002
Well, and so what. This is still a composite. It's not even a known that it would comprise a viable human being.
When they get a map entirely from a single human being, whether it's the researcher or whoever, that's a real landmark.
It's not even a known that it would comprise a viable human being.Well, and so what. IOW, what does that have to do with his corruption? That is the point of that story.
It would be corruption if he had broken a promise made by the program. Sounds like the ethical canons are being made up here after the fact.
[M]embers of Celera's scientific advisory board expressed disappointment that Dr. Venter subverted the anonymous selection process that they had approved...
Reads just as though Celera didn't make its rules tight enough to exclude that kind of end run. "Sure, I'll just donate most of it anonymously myself... and ha ha ha who will know?!"
It's an ego thing that casts a cloud on the whole experiment, that's all. Leads one to suspect what else may have been compromised.
When there are a number of single-person maps, then Celera's map can be checked for veracity. It's probably OK despite the scientist who lawyered the rules to get mostly himself sequenced.
When a single person can be fully mapped that information can be stored electronically.
That should give one pause.
At that point, sometime in the future, one would be able to replicate people based on an electronic data base. Exact duplicates without the need (or permission) to store biological material.
At what point do we start picking from the various maps to combine what we think are their best attributes of each and mass producing them?
I thought decoding the human genome takes a long time to do, and even then with a hell of a lot of scientists.
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