Hijacking the Genome for private profit

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): With the end of the year fast approaching, there's no doubt about the most important issue of 1999, and probably of a number of years to come. It is Craig Venter's attempt to pre-empt the government-funded Human Genome Project and hijack the human genetic code for private profit -- profit on a scale that would make even Bill Gates green with envy.

The Human Genome Project estimates that its researchers will complete their analysis of the entire human genome -- all 80,000 genes and their estimated three billion bits of information -- before the end of the year 2000. Venter is claiming that he can get the job finished even faster by using hundreds of "automatic gene sequencers", supercomputers costing US$300,000 each. Either way, the world will be transformed.

"The nature of biology is changing," explained Graham Bulfield of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was produced in 1966. "It has been a descriptive science for most of this century. Now it's becoming a predictive science, and that is very important for humanity."

The shift in the science of biology is comparable in scope to what happened to chemistry in the last century, when they were puzzling out the elements of the periodic table, or to physics early in this century, when everything from relativity to nuclear weapons got dumped in our laps. But biology is about living things, notably including human beings, so the potential impact of the genome project on individual human lives is far greater.

Decoding the "human blueprint" is the key step that will make it possible to create gene therapies not only for many diseases but perhaps also for "natural" conditions like aging. Parents will be able to genetically "tailor" their offspring. The implications are going to roll through human societies like a tidal wave for decades to come -- and Craig Venter would like to charge a fee on each transaction.

Venter's companies, like many other research teams in both private industry and the universities, have been working on the genetic code of other, simpler organisms -- microbes and the like -- since 1995. Until last year he was also collaborating, with about 350 other labs in the United States and Britain, on the publicly funded Human Genome Project. But then he quit and set up his own rival project, funded by private capital: his flagship company, Celera, moved into its Rockville, Maryland headquarters in late 1998.

At that time he told the U.S. Congress that the company's research would be freely available, and as recently as April Celera had only applied for patents on a couple of hundred medically important genes. "The fact is that we are going to spend $300 million on sequencing the human genome," he told an interviewer at that time, "and we will make it all available on the internet."

Wonderful, but you couldn't help wondering why all those investors would put up their own money just to advance the cause of biology. The answer came in October, when Celera announced that it had already sequenced 1.2 billion of the 3 billion amino acid "bits" that make up the human genome -- and applied for patents on 6,500 sequences that it suspected were medically promising.

Craig Venter likes to stress that "every researcher in the world will have the human genome ahead of time" thanks to Celera, rather than discussing all the money the Rockville operation will make if it can corner the market in human genetics. But the truth is that if Venter and all of his automatic sequencing machines -- "more computing power than 90 percent of countries," he boasts -- were to be abducted by space aliens today, all the relevant information about the human genome would still be available in a year's time.

The high-speed Celera strategy is simply designed to beat the mainstream scientific effort being funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health and Britain's Wellcome Institute to the punch. Use super-computers to churn the data out, in however sketchy a form, and get the patent applications in, before the publicly-funded effort that would make the same information available for free has time to publish it.

Scientists working in the official Human Genome Project criticize Venter's techniques, claiming that data provided only by automatic sequencing machines is inherently less reliable than their broad-front approach, and that Venter does too little research on what the sequences really control. But the bigger question is whether anybody has the right to do what Venter proposes: patent this basic scientific information, legally prevent the publicly funded project from distributing it for free, and instead make it available only "on a subscription basis" to universities and other companies.

The U.S. Patent Office seems to think he can. It has already issued three patents to other researchers giving them proprietary rights on decoded segments of human DNA, and it is considering up to 10,000 other applications from Venter and various pharmaceutical companies. But Jeremy Rifkin of the Washington- based Foundation on Economic Trends claims that this is actually illegal: "Under U.S. law discoveries in nature are not inventions. The U.S. Patent Office has been violating its statute."

It will end up in the courts, of course, which will at the least slow down the exploitation of this new knowledge for the benefit of human beings. And if Venter wins not only the race but the court case, all subsequent medical use of this information will cost more, which is bound to restrict the number of people who will benefit from it. But Venter will get very rich indeed.