Reminds me of "GATTACA" Jon >From salon.com http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/02/26/biopunk/print.html
Excerpt: Genome liberation The information that details who we are is too important to be privately owned. By Annalee Newitz February 26, 2002 08:30:00 PM At Jim Kent's Human Genome Browser Gateway, anyone curious about the fundamental building blocks of the human body can point and click their way through gigabytes of publicly available genetic data. The vast data set is only about 90 percent complete, in contrast to the proprietary sequencing of the human genome already assembled by the biotech company Celera, but what is there is open to all -- provided they have the biological chops to make sense of it. Users can click on pictures of chromosomes, drilling down into the data until they reach individual genes or areas of as-yet-unanalyzed sequences of nucleotides. The data has been made available for reasons that stretch beyond mere scientific curiosity. When Celera's former CEO Craig Venter pushed his company to finish mapping the human genome before the government-funded, public Human Genome Project (HGP), the move was widely considered an attempt to demonstrate that science is done more efficiently by the private sector. But Celera ended up filing hundreds of patents on discoveries it made while sequencing the genome, and access to the database itself is exorbitantly expensive. For the scientists working on the Human Genome Project, the data defining who we are is too important to be left to Celera -- or any other company. David Haussler, a team leader at the University of California at Santa Cruz who helped Kent and others put the genome online, expresses the credo of a data liberator succinctly: "Information about the human genome is better in public hands than secretly locked up somewhere." But it's not just the research data itself that is at the center of the tug of war between corporations and scientists. When working with data as complex and vast as the human genome, the software tools necessary to manipulate that data are as important as the genetic code itself. A whole new science of "bioi nformatics" -- a flowering of software and hardware explicitly designed to analyze genomic information at blisteringly fast speeds -- has arisen, operating at the intersection of computers and biology.
