Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Venter profile   posted by JP @ 6/27/2006 08:55:00 AM
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Via Free Association comes a profile of Craig Venter, the so-called "maverick biologist".

1. Apparently Venter is going to be publishing his own genome sequence shortly and making it publicly available, which is pretty cool. If technically trivial, would you do the same? I'll go ahead and say I would--Venter makes the good point that we don't know what most of it does anyways, so GATTACA-like scenarios are far from being reality. And data is hard enough to come by as it is; I'd be happy to let other people play around with my genome sequence and see what they find.

2. The article makes some mention of the "race" to sequence the genome, and how it ended in a tie. I've explained before why that's BS: Venter and Celera published eventually published an independent genome sequence, but they didn't do it until 2004.