Rival claims mar gene findings release

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, FEB. 12. A bitter row between two rival teams of scientists marred the release today of dramatic new findings about the human genetic code which, among things, reveal that 99.99 per cent of the code is common to all human beings and it is only the fraction of a difference that makes one individual different from the other. It is also revealed that a startlingly large number of human genes are identical with those of dogs and chimpanzees; and the colour of the skin is not in the genes. The announcement of what is believed to be a major breakthrough in understanding the human genome and its implications was clouded by a war of words between a private U.S. team led by Dr. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics company and a public-funded U.K.-based research group comprising scientists from several countries. The two sides claimed that their research was more complete and accurate with Dr. Craig boasting that he had stolen the ``thunder'' from the rival group whose work was ``scrambled much of the time.''

Sir John Sulston, leader of the public project and former director of the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge, which was involved in the research said the Celera was able to finish its work more quickly because it poached on the data of public research which was routinely put on the Internet. The Celera's data on the other hand was not freely available, and only paid subscribers had access to it.

The public researchers were bitter that Dr. Venter broke the embargo on announcement and spoke to The Observer on Sunday in a bid to hog the headlines. ``Some feel that we have stolen their fame...and there are probably going to be some people who are very unhappy that Celera exist and are successful,'' he said. The rivalries go back to the original research on mapping human genes but last June they shared a common platform to announce the first ever gene map - only to go to back their own laboratories. While both questioned each other's methodology, in the end the findings are almost identical - the most important being that the total number of genes in human body were far fewer than the scientists believed when they announced the first genetic map last year - between 30,000 and 40,000 or even less than the originally estimated over 100,000.

The findings are to be published in two journals - the American journal ``Science'' would publish Celera's ``map'' and the British research would go to ``Nature''. Broadly, the new evidence shows that the human body is not genetically ``hard wired'' as was originally believed and demolish the notion that there is a gene for everything. ``In everyday language the talk is about a gene for this and a gene for that. We are now finding that is rarely so. The number of genes that work in that way can almost be counted on your fingers because we are just not hard wired in that way,'' Dr. Venter explained adding that the idea that ``you got the gene for this from your mother and the gene for that from your father'' was fallacious.

The new evidence should come as a body blow to ``racist'' thinkers who have sought to ascribe white skin to superior genes. It shows that genetic variations among people of the same colour are far more than those between different racial groups. Also, human beings may not be flattered to be told that genetically they are much more like animals - particularly to dog, chimpanzee and fruitfly - than they believed. The findings have thrown up a host of questions and to answer these researchers say they would need to look beyond genes. For the layman, the message is: the world is a step closer to finding a cure for seemingly incurable diseases.

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Section  : International
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