(Circulation. 2000;101:e67.)
© 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.
Circulation Electronic Pages |
Who Owns Your DNA? Who Will Own It?
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Introduction |
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Quietly and doggedly, a race is going on in laboratories around the world—the race to determine who will own human heritage.
On one side is the G5, as Frances Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, calls the US and British sequencing teams chasing the full sequence of the human genome at breakneck speed. On the other side is the private sector, most notably Craig Venter, PhD, chief scientific officer of Celera, a genomics company.
Each group has the same mission: to unravel the sequence of human DNA. DNA is written in the 4-letter alphabet of C(ytosine), (G)uanosine, (A)denine, and (T)hymine and is the blueprint for human life. When the code is written correctly, a healthy, whole human results. Any misspellings, however, can result in a defect and a disease. As many of us know all too well, those single-gene defects can be deadly.
As Dr Collins put it in a recent speech before the Houston Forum Club, "Virtually all disease, except some trauma, has a hereditary component. And there are no perfect genetic specimens."
What does this mean? It means that the predisposition to disease can be
found in the misspellings of a person’s DNA. In most cases, whether a
person gets the disease or not depends on environment: the chemicals
that surround homes and offices, the viruses with which individuals
come in contact, the stresses under which people live day in and day
out, etc. In only a few cases is the disease "hard-wired"