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Male Speaker: Having the genetic code changes the way we
look at everything.
Male Speaker: It really allows the individual and individual
creativity and insight and intuition to really come to the fore again in biology.
Male Speaker: In 1960, there were so many things, we said,
"Will we ever be able to do these things?"
I don't think, we never even thought about sequencing the genome.
Much simpler things seemed daunting at the time.
And here I was sitting 30 years later and there was the sequence of the genome in front
of me.
And I just had this sense of history coming together, the pace of history moving at an
incredible rate.
Male Speaker: And in fact it has changed biology.
There's no question if we've moved into a new era.
We're accumulating data in orders of magnitude more rapidly than we were before.
In fact I would go so far as to say for the first time we now have the tools commensurate
to the task of understanding biological systems.
Male Speaker: There's going to be a bright line in history
and the bright line in history is going to start with the first genome going forward
because it completely revolutionizes how science is done.
The pace of which science is done.
The pace of which discoveries are made and will ultimately revolutionize medicine.
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Male Speaker: Most of the analysis of genome sequences is
really focused on the genes for obvious reasons.
The bits that codes for proteins and how many proteins they make and what are those proteins
are, what the so called proteomes of each individual genome is.
Female Speaker: What that has revealed is not simply where
the genes are, which is an important thing to know, but it's shown us that Mother Nature
is conserving far more than the genes.
It's conserving segments up and down the genome and for the most part we don't have the slightest
idea why she has done that.
This is going to be grist for the mill for the next 10 to 20 years.
Male Speaker: For protein coding regions, we have the genetic
code.
We've had that for some time.
We don't really understand how to interpret the DNA sequence of the rest of the genome.
And the best method, it turns out, for doing that is to rely on evolution.
Let me tell you the example of the fruit fly.
If I showed you the drosophila melanogaster and a drosophila pseudoobscura, for all intents
and purposes, they would look identical to you, yet they are 60 million years different
in evolution.
And if you look at the genome sequences, only those sequences that had some selective advantage
that were important would be conserved.
I think a lot of the challenges in genomics are really to understand what the rest of
the DNA does in the organism.
Female Speaker: Comparative genomics, I think is going to
be one of the most exciting areas for the next probably 10 to 20 years.
For one thing, I think it is the only way we're going to really begin to understand
the human genome.
For myself, as a mouse biologist, one of the most exciting things to do right now is to
take a segment of a chromosome from a mouse and compare it base for base to the same segment
from the human genome.
For one thing what it does is it tells us, it identifies every single important segment
of that chromosome because it's the part that Mother Nature has chosen to conserve in the
50 to 75 million years since mouse and humans separated from one another.
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Male Speaker: Biology in the 21st century is rapidly turning
into something that's half experimental and half an information science.
A science where there's as much to be gained from mining data in fast public databases.
Male Speaker: You will not be able to do biology going forward
without being incredibly computer literate.
We'll be able to eliminate 99 percent of the random experiments and use the computers to
narrow down using all this information of what is the key experiment to do that will
advance science.
Male Speaker: Now the scientists mid-century, they purified
the DNA molecule away from the cell.
The Human Genome Project now purified the information away from the DNA molecule and
that's going to be as profound a transformation in this century.
Male Speaker: Having the genome sequences there, having
it available on our computer, really allows the individual and individual creativity and
insight and intuition to really come to the fore again in biology.
Now when everything's in the database, people can begin to think and design particular experiments.
They can go back to their original idea, their creative idea and they can be much more enabled.
I think it really enables the small research scientist.
It also enables the theoretical biologist.
So if you had asked me five years ago to name the successful theoretical biologists in the
world, I would have named Francis Crick, and there would have been a long pause.
And I would say, "I'm sure there must be somebody else but I can't think of who they are."
I think now we're really engendering the field where these massive datasets are being generated,
made freely available.
[speaking simultaneously]
Male Speaker: -- in terms of how well the [inaudible] mapped,
so if you look at --
Male Speaker: There's really an opportunity for people to
come in and interpret the data.
Male Speaker: -- orthologs between melanogaster --
Male Speaker: It really brings the intellectual content
back into research and really makes the individual, not even the individual group, but the individual
person, a real unit of scientific discovery again.
So I think it's tremendously liberating.
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Male Speaker: I think this is the groundwork for human biology
and medicine of the future.
[speaking simultaneously]
Male Speaker: -- that's about 50 --
Male Speaker: As a physician, it is the medical implications
of the genome project that have always seemed to me the most compelling the reason to do
this, a chance to alleviate suffering, to cure diseases that we currently have little
to offer for.
That's why we're doing this.
Male Speaker: My favorite way of looking at the impact of
the genome is a story which actually didn't involve sequencing of the genome.
It involves sequencing of a gene.
It was a gene that we discovered years ago in a cancer-inducing virus which controlled
the growth properties of cells, which was an oncogene, and was discovered to be in a
human cancer, the critical element that led to the human cancer.
And Novartis drug company took that information and built a compound which inhibits that enzyme.
And that has now revolutionized the treatment of the disease, chronic myelogenous leukemia,
the drug being Gleevec.
That's the poster child because that's what basic molecular information can lead you to
it, can lead you to drugs that are specific, that are powerful, that are safe.
Male Speaker: So we can design preventive drugs or design
proteins or design genes or whatever and in doing so I expect we'll add easily 20 plus
years to the average lifespan and those 20 plus years will be productive and creative
years.
And theoretically that poses a really interesting challenge for society of how we treat older
people.
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Male Speaker: Well knowledge, particularly large increases
in knowledge, always have major effects on society.
And this is knowledge about living organisms, and of course that includes us.
Male Speaker: While there's a genetic component to almost
everything, there's a huge difference between the physical and the actual life outcomes.
And the future of medicine will have to deal with that difference.
Male Speaker: And this quite naturally leads to the whole
issue of genetic privacy.
So if we know all of your predispositions, who has a right to have that information?
Does your insurance company?
Does your employer?
Does your family?
Do your friends?
I mean, where do we draw the boundaries for these kinds of things?
Female Speaker: A lot of patients who want to push their doctors
for information which is going to force the doctors to educate themselves even if they
don't want to necessarily.
So if a patient comes in and says, you know, I have breast cancer, what's the likelihood,
my kids, my daughters are going to get breast cancer, you better go look it up.
Male Speaker: My patients will, I think, drive the medical
community even faster than they were prepared to go by asking the right questions and not
resting until they get the answers.
Male Speaker: We're going to see miracles.
We're going to see miracles of all sorts coming out of the molecular information that we have,
translated through chemistry, translated through clinical experience, and that's what this
is all about.
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