From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Mar 19 2001 - 20:39:02 MST
Yes! Yes! Yes!
This news item:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2001/319/2
says a group lead by RIKEN's Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama,
Japan, with centers from Germany, China, Taiwan, and Korea is
planning to tackle the chimp genome. They can probably do this
for a few tens of millions of dollars because they can simply
overlay much of it on the human genome (and therefore do not
have to do as much redundant sequencing to assemble the whole
sequence.)
This is *very* good. Why? Because having it is going to give
us some pretty good insights into (a) the genes that promote
higher intelligence; (b) the genes that promote communication
(e.g. speech); (c) the genes that produce our longevity which
is about twice that of the chimps.
It also means now that all of the major organisms are complete,
being completed or spoken for -- Human, mouse, rat, zebrafish, Fugu,
all the major bacteria that cause human diseases, all the major
protozoa that cause human disease (and their carriers),
Drosophila, C. Elegans and several yeast.
When those are all done, the stage will be set for the 2nd tier
organisms -- those that I listed at Extro 4 as useful because
they have already invented novel solutions to the problems
that need to be solved for slowly aging or non-aging organisms.
If I and some others have any say in motivating the people
at the various genome centers these will be the next set
of organisms to be sequenced.
And since people like "predictions", I'd say no later than
2004 should you see at least one of these started and no
later than 2007 should you see one or more of them finished.
Robert
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