In the last two days, the shares of the "Selera" company rose by about 47%, and the stock traded in trading cycles 3.5 times larger than the average. This follows rumors on Wall Street that the company has finished preparing what it calls a "first draft of the human genome".
by Tamara Traubman
In the last two days, the shares of the "Selera" company rose by about 47%, and the stock traded in trading cycles 3.5 times larger than the average. This follows rumors on Wall Street that the company has finished preparing what it calls a "first draft of the human genome".
The draft is supposed to contain the decoding of the genetic code of the human genome, with several errors and undeciphered parts.
Celera, a private American company based in Maryland, competes in the Public Genome Project - in which scientists from universities from all over the world who are funded by public funds participate - with the aim of being the first to decipher the human genome.
Deciphering the human genome requires identifying the order of approximately 3 billion DNA bases, which together constitute the human genome. Since the sequence of DNA bases contains all the complex and complicated instructions for human development, from the moment of conception onwards, obtaining a first draft of the sequence - and completing a "copy His "final" in a year or two - is expected to be a significant landmark in the history of biology.
"Achieving the genetic instruction book will be a dizzying moment - all of biology and medicine are going to be divided into what we knew before it and what we will know after it," Dr. Eric Lander, director of the genome center at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, one of the leading research centers in the public genome project, told Haaretz.
A BBC reporter claimed on Tuesday that an official at Celera told him that the company actually finished deciphering the human genome at the end of the week, and will make an official announcement about it today.
The company's spokeswoman, Heather Kolovski, told "Haaretz" yesterday that the draft may be published in any of the coming days, but refused to specify an exact date. Celera and the Public Genome Project have been on an accelerated schedule in recent months, and both have announced that they will publish a first draft of the genome this month.
Scientists said yesterday that since Vassela has not yet publicly released the decryption data she performed, it is not yet clear how many mistakes there will be in her draft and how reliable her decryption method, which is different from the public project's method, is. Celera is not expected to make the results of its research publicly available, at least until the end of this year. The company allows pharmaceutical companies to use the information for a fee.
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 7/6/2000}
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