Compaq will build a computer that will greatly speed up the calculations needed to decode the genome
Genome researchers at the US Department of Energy and Celera announced on Friday the unification of computer technology with biology, by signing a cooperation agreement with the computer company "Compaq".
They intend to establish a team in cooperation with "Compaq", which will write computer programs and build a supercomputer, which will go through the genome sequence and find where the genes are and what their function is. The parties promised to dig into the map of the human genome in order to discover information that, they hope, will change the world of medicine.
"We are now writing the first draft of the future," said Neil Lane, President Clinton's science adviser. He repeated the words of the scientists, according to which the decoding of the human genome will change medicine and the basic understanding of biology.
The agreement, estimated at tens of millions of dollars, was signed by advisor Lane, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, President of the National Laboratories Paul Robinson, President of Celera, Craig Venter,
and the vice president of Compaq, Bill Blake.
The human genome sequence was decoded last year, but the decoding only gave the code for the human genetics map, now the code needs to be cracked. The parts that make up DNA repeat over and over again, in a pattern that the body can understand, but to the human eye it looks garbled. The researchers hope that a computer will be able to find the meaning in the repeating pattern.
Celera completed sequencing the genome last year, and the Human Genome Project, which is publicly funded in cooperation with the Department of Energy, has done its own sequencing. Many genes are already known but the code is so dense that it is not yet clear how many genes there are.
Celera is already running several computers, most of them manufactured by Compaq, to hack into the genetic information. "By using computers equipped with Compaq's Alpha chips, and through the flowcharts written by Celera's team, they were able to shorten a process that took nine hours to five minutes," Celera President Craig Venter said, adding: "We have to perform the calculations that take five minutes in a few seconds, that's the goal of the new covenant we made".
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