At 20:14 01/01/2011 -0800, Natalia wrote:
What do you think of this group effort to rewrite DNA code?
Not much. In fact, I would strongly advise anybody thinking of contributing
$20 to keep clear of it. Andrew Hessel appears to be quite a genuine fellow
and not a crook but, nevertheless, I would still advise keeping $20 in
their pocket. If he calls himself a geneticist then he's obviously a lay
geneticist who is patently not up to date in the latest research
He's completely wrong when he says that pharmaceutical companies have been
glacial in developing DNA-based remedies for cancer, heart disease,
Alzheimers, etc. Is this remotely likely? The potential market is so huge
that it's nonsense to suggest that they wouldn't go full tilt into
it. Indeed, they did. The mammoth Roche company of Switzerland has already
lost $500 million and several more large pharmaceutical companies (and
several more genetics corporations) have lost hundreds of billions more
already.
The reason why they lost money is that they had been proceeding under
pre-2003 ideas that single genes have single effects. After 2003
(publication of the first draft of the Human Genome Project), it was
realized that genetic predisposition to very many diseases (particularly
those that affect middle- to old-aged people) depend on effects caused by
many genes acting in various coalitions and in various circumstances. The
cure for these diseases is of several times more orders of complexity than
was thought before 2003. It will be many years, perhaps decades or even a
century or two before even the simplest of these polygenic diseases are
even understood, never mind cured. (In many case, these diseases have
environmental triggers and the best that can be done in the meantime is to
advise people what triggers to avoid.) The large pharmaceutical are still
spending large sums on DNA research, but this time much more cautiously
because they know that a great deal more needs to be discovered yet -- and
most of this will be coming from the much large array of university and
foundation research labs.
However, Andrew Hessel is right in one respect. DNA knowledge and
subsequent cures might very well come from outside the pharmaceutical
industry itself. Some of the greatest ideas in mankind's history come from
geniuses who are not where you;d expect them to be. And, as Freeman Dyson
said recently, because genetics is not as highly capital intensive as any
advanced technologies hitherto, we might well have a large
"garage-genetics" sector before too long. The amount of DNA is huge and
freely available on the Internet. The equipment (e.g. DNA-sequencers) are
becoming cheaper all the time. Necessary super-computer processing power
can be organized these days by distributed PCs. (A great deal of
astronomical research is now carried out by this method.) Thus,big
breakthroughs in DNA applications might just as well come from talented
individuals working at home and networking with others elsewhere in the
world. But they will seek out and organize themselves.
Keith
Crowdsourcing cure faster: scientist
Geneticist says the more people researching, the better
Shannon Proudfoot, Postmedia News
Published: Friday, December 31, 2010
A Canadian geneticist's plans to crowdsource a cure for breast cancer is
among the things being forecasted for 2011 and beyond by the World Future
Society.
The Washington, D.C.-based think-tank releases an annual report of the
most intriguing glimpses of the future gathered from researchers,
futurists and big thinkers over the past year, including a Toronto-based
geneticist who's working on a novel way to seek a cure for cancer.
Andrew Hessel co-founded Pink Army Co-operative in 2009 because he was
frustrated by the glacial pace of big pharmaceutical development and
convinced lives could be saved faster with many brains working collectively.
He's hoping to attract 2,500 people who will pay $20 each for a share in
the non-profit Pink Army, and he's collected about 420 mini-investors so
far. The seed money will fund the first steps in what he envisions as a
crowdsourced cure tailored for each person's cancer and powered by
synthetic biology, a fast-growing area of genetics that lets researchers
rewrite DNA code instead of just cutting and pasting.
"I do this not because I'm running a lab or want to make a million
dollars; I'm doing it because it's such a powerful technology and almost
nobody knows about it," he says.
"The only way you're ever going to beat cancer is, first of all, strip the
profit motive out of it -- that's just crazy."
Profits and patents have "siloed" cancer researchers and companies who
jealously guard their innovations rather than building on each other's
work and making significant strides in cancer treatment, Hessel says.
He chose breast cancer as a starting point because the disease has such a
powerful advocacy and fundraising community, and once Pink Army has enough
funding to get off the ground, he plans to open up the research and design
process to a Wiki-type model.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2010
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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