From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Sep 28 1999 - 19:16:41 MDT
On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Kathryn Aegis wrote:
>
> Y'know why I don't post the full URLs anymore? Because they shifted to
> afternoon and evening editions, and if you don't access it by late
> afternoon, the index prefixes change.
That's silly it makes extra work for them. Links should be forever
or automatically reroute.
>
> >Clearly the government scientists and strategies have been
> >scooped in this affair.
>
> Only on the basic components. Celera deliberately choose the 'fast and
> dirty' method, whereas the government-sponsored projects chose to focus on
> the full detailed information. Both should turn out to be useful for
> different kinds of applications.
Thats what some of the government researchers would like to have
you believe. Celera had two things going for it (a) access to
300 really good sequencing machines; and (b) Eugene Myers. Myers
actually worked out the mathematics and did the simulations showing that
you really could reassemble small fragments into the complete genome.
I won't go into the complexities of the methods they are using but
it basically comes down to the fact that you can use multiple tags
that show up in the small fragments to virtually "guarantee" that you
are connecting the dots correctly. It boils down to the fact that
(historically) most of the people working on the genome project
were biologists and biologists generally don't do math and they
don't generally attack problems from the perspective of "what can
one of the world's largest supercomputers do for me?"
> It's not mentioned in the article, but Venter is banking on marketing a
> software library system, one that would allow Celera to sell subscriptions
> to a certain method of accessing and utilizing genome data.
This has been the path of all of the sequencing companies (Human Genome
Sciences, Incyte, Millennium, etc.) to a greater or lesser degree.
Celera, I believe intends to go farther since I think they want to
get into the position of determing what some of the genes do functionally.
For example, we know enough about gene structure now to recognize what genes
look like that are "receptors" or "transcription regulatory factors"
but we don't know enough to know what binds to the receptor or the
piece of DNA that a transcription factor regulates. After you have
all that sequence you have to take these next steps to add value to
the data.
> His argument is that the government data will be free of charge, but it
> will be in raw form and difficult to sort through for specific purposes.
Yep, they are selling value-added because they have really good software
people and will probably have a huge pool of gene "curators".
> Persons hoping to obtain patents using that data could use his library
> system for research and development in specialized areas.
>
It will be nice to see the whole patent debate move out of the
information in the sequence and into the "creative" applications
of it (which was presumably what the law intended).
The government funded efforts are valuable because they are publishing
the data as fast as they produce it, which is forcing the corporations
to be more innovative and add more value to have something that people
will be willing to buy.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:19 MST