Human Genome Project NIH Watson

I left out this post by mistake and it should have come before today's,

The Human Genome Project is the most important scientific advancement that we have made in this century. It was a huge undertaking sponsored by the US Department of Energy, the National Institute of Health(NIH) with involvement of a number of other countries as well Incredibly by 2003 all the genes in human DNA were identified as well as the sequence of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.This has enormous implications in a wide variety of areas but in medicine it has allowed examination of specific genes that may be involved in a number of diseases, including psychiatric disorders. One of the goals of the project was to address the ethical, legal, and social issues that arise from this project. It didn't tale long for controversy to emerge


J.Venter, a biologist at NIH, began the process of requesting patents. He had not sequenced whole genes but rather fragments of DNA referred to as EST (Expressed Sequence Tags). I have tried to understand what exactly is an EST but it is way over my head. By the early 90's he had requested over 7,000 patents for different EST's. In effect he was trying with NIH to basically patent the human gene which would be a disaster for science. James Watson opposed this policy and had to resign as Director of the project as NIH was planning on continuing the patenting process. The controversy eventually was resolved when the US Patent Office rejected all the applications.


So as much as there is present controversy regarding James Watson he did lose the chance to complete The Human Genome Project by standing up for scientific principles over profit.



Thought for the day

Sometimes it is hard to do the right thing.

The Double Helix Watson DNA Part 3

Since I have already recommended The Double Helix by James Watson I will not discuss anymore the bock except for a few brief points. I then want to move into two different scientific controversies in which Watson has subsequently been involved.

Watson and Crick received a Nobel prize in 1962 for their work on DNA. What I did not know was that another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, at a different laboratory shared the Nobel prize along with Watson and Crick as they used a lot of his data on X ray crystallography in their own work. The interesting thing to me was that Rosalind Franklin who worked with Wilkins and did much of the crystallography work herself and whose x ray picture of DNA was used (some say stolen) as the final piece of evidence that Watson and Crick needed to develop their model did not share the Nobel. Four researchers and three prizes. The woman was left out. I hope we have come along way since 1962. Watson did in his book credit her. She died before the Nobels were awarded so never knew she was excluded.

In 1988 Watson became Director of the National Institute of Health (NIH) project on the human genome, an ambitious project to sequence the entire human genome. NIH had several goals. They wanted to identify all the approimately 20,00-25,000 genes in DNA, determine the sequencing of the 3 billion base pairs that make up human DNA, store the information in data bases, improve tools for data analyses, transfer technologies to the private sector and address the ethical, legal, and social issues that could arise from such a project. Amazingly the identification of all the human genes and determination of all the base pairs crompising DNA was accoilplished in 2003. Watson resigned in 1992, howsever and was not there to see the project to completion. I will discuss that in another post.

Thought for the day

"Utter not a word by which anyone could be wounded"

Ancient Hindu saying