Listen to Nobel Laureate

Human genetic information must be kept in the public domain to allow researchers to analyse it and give members of the public fair access to medical treatments says the leader of Britains contribution to the human genome project yesterday. Speaking at the Science museum Sir John Hulston said scientists and lawmakers must stop cynical individuals and evil corporations.
Already in the US it costs a woman £3000 for a breast cancer test because a corporation owns the patent for the 2 genes involved.
He is particularly concerned about Craig Ventner, the Vietnam veteran who earlier this month claimed to have created life. Though his work is clever his objective is an attempt to monopolise through the patenting system the essential tools for genomic manipulation.
'The tools for manipulating genomes should be in the public domain. This is not just a philosophical point of view, it's actually the case that monopolistic control of this kind would be bad for science, bad for consumers and bad for buisness, because it removes the element of competition.'
Before the Human Genome Project completed its first draft in 2000, Sulston had fought to keep genome data freely accessible to researchers. At the same time, Venter was racing to sequence the human genome through his company, Celera, with the intention of charging researchers for access to the information.
In 2000 the 2 sides brokered a deal through the mediation of the UK and US governments and the human genome was put in the public domain.
In the decade since the idea of the UK 10,000 Genomes Project has been working on comparing rare varients and common varients that make differences to many complaints. About 4000 genomes will be sequenced from healthy people who are already part of large scale project to monitor a range of biological and health factors such as height and body weight.
Their genetic data will be compared with genome sequences from 6000 people who have specific disorders including severe obesity, autism, schizophrenia and congenital heart disease.