[extropy-chat] Futures Past

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:26 PM 10/9/2005 -0700, The Avantguardian wrote:

>Well for one thing, the human genome was mapped way
>faster than any one, either transhumanists, pundits,
>or even the scientists that were working on it
>themselves thought possible.

No it wasn't (I think, but unfortunately my major reference materials are 
thousands of kilometres away). The announcement that the project was 
complete was made in advance of expectation, true, but they were disguising 
the unwelcome fact that it *wasn't* complete. Here's a fragment from my 
book FEROCIOUS MINDS (footnotes unavailable in this text, sorry.):

=========

In February 2000, then-United States President Bill Clinton stood
proudly at a podium to announce that the human genome draft was
complete. Actually, this map of our common genetic recipe was still
badly gappy. Clinton called it `a day for the ages'. He was flanked at his
left by Dr. Francis Collins, devout Christian leader of the painstaking
public American end of the global Human Genome Project (HGP). At his
right stood Dr. Craig Venter, the carpetbagger who had roared into
Dodge fixing to finish off the genome by the `shotgun' method, beating
those slow-poke bureaucrats even though they'd drawn first--and, if his
Celera Genomics company could get away with it, patenting the spoils.
Ironically, Venter was soon to be fired by Celera, which was less
interested in research than in realizing profits from pharmaceutical
applications.

Nearly half a century after the fabled DNA helix was first unraveled
in Britain by Englishman Francis Crick and a youthful visiting American,
James Watson, a key non-American strand of the Genome Project’s
thread in this vast common project was largely overlooked. Prime
Minister Tony Blair seized photo opportunities, but not many people
knew that a major player in this epochal search was a genial expert in
nematode worms, John Sulston (now Sir John). In 1989 Sulston had
helped start the sequencing project, with DNA helix co-discoverer Jim
Watson and another American worm specialist, Bob Waterson, and ran
the United Kingdom end, the Sanger Center, until late in 2000 (Sulston
and Ferry, 2001).91

The speed of these successful efforts was genuinely breathtaking. As
recently as mid-1996, the effort was only just gearing up after vast
preparation for its major push, massively and crucially funded by the
philanthropic Wellcome Trust, heirs to a pharmaceutics fortune. Only a
few percent of the three billion genetic letters had yet been read. In May,
1998, with the aid of venture capitalists, Craig Venter entered the arena,
ready to complete the human sequence within three years--four or five
years earlier than the public project's goal­and without a cent of
taxpayers' money.

Journalists were agog. Here was the brash American way at its best:
audacious, putting its money where its mouth was in expectation of
prodigious rewards, perhaps even a bit unprincipled. The race hotted up
with incredible speed. To everyone's astonishment, private and public
wings released their data simultaneously to the scientific press in
February, 2001--Sulston's team (although by then he had resigned)
through the British journal Nature, Celera's via the American journal
Science. The human genome had been decoded in barely more than a
decade, a triumph comparable, we were told, to placing men on the
Moon, with unfathomable future consequences.

The trouble with this story, like the one about political asylum
seekers in Australian waters throwing their children into the sea to force
their rescue by an unwilling Navy, is that it is untrue, and politically
motivated. Sulston's own brilliantly enthralling tale blends his amused,
amusing and slightly bumbling persona (as captured by science journalist
Ferry, who adds meaty chunks from her interviews with other major
players) with the increasingly furious, indignant tones of a prophet
scorned. Those publications in 2001 were not at all the glorious
consummation trumpeted in the press. Indeed, the human genome was
not really finished until the original HGP target date, 2003, and even
then some small fragment remained undecoded.25

===========

Damien Broderick