Comprehensive coverage

The human genome business

By Lee Silver, New York Times

When the US President, Bill Clinton, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, declared last week that all scientific information about the human genome should be "fully accessible to scientists all over the world" - they contributed their part to the long-running debate accompanying the race to decipher the human genetic code. The problem is that their joint statement will not advance the public interest and will give one group of researchers an unfair advantage over another group.

On one side of the barrier is a group of Americans who benefit from public support and work in collaboration with British researchers, who are funded by the non-profit Wellcome Foundation. This group, guided by the noble principle that no one should own the human genome, publishes its findings every day, for the free use of scientists all over the world.

On the other side of the fence are a handful of biotechnology companies
American women, who are also studying the genome, but are not publishing, for now, their findings. The most prominent of them is the Celera company, which decodes the genome at a faster rate than the public group. The company's president, Craig Venter,
He does not feel any need to apologize for his motives: he intends to use the genome for profit.

Thus, Venter can be seen as the "bad" hero in the story and scientists working with the support of the government - the "good" ones, but things are not as simple as they seem. More than a battle for morality, this is a battle for profits and control.

No geneticist can deny the claim that the secrets of the genome will serve the human race in the most exhaustive way precisely through the pursuit of profit by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which drives their efforts to develop drugs and cures. And despite the moral commitment advocated by senior academic scientists in the genome project, some of them have invested money in companies that, although they do not map the genome themselves, hope to eventually profit from the information produced from both private and public research.

Celera, like its rivals Human Genome Sciences and Incyte, is taking a huge financial risk in collecting information about the genome and wants to profit from any advantage it may derive. Dr. Venter intends to publish all the raw data collected by his company as soon as the study is completed. To profit from this, he intends to sell the powerful software and supercomputing services that make the raw data understandable and usable for the purpose of developing drugs and treatment methods.

But the many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that do not map the genome are not interested in paying for the raw information, nor for the information that can be understood (for the sake of full disclosure I must confess: I own a modest amount of shares in both Celera and one of those pharmaceutical companies). Therefore they await the publications of the Anglo-American group. And while they are opposed to Dr. Venter's plans, they are not opposed to treatments and drugs developed using genes being registered as a patent.

In no other business field can there be a debate about the right of a company to control the information it has discovered and published and to profit from it. Unfortunately, biotechnology is unlike any other business field. The public, naturally, feels uneasy about the possibility of companies profiting from our genetic code. But if the goal is to make genetic information useful as soon as possible, the debate should focus on business fairness and regulations, not morality.

The writer is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University

© Published in "Haaretz" on 03/19/2000

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