Word: two
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When President Clinton held a press conference last June to mark what was billed as one of the most important scientific milestones of the century--the cracking of the human genetic code--two men stood together on a White House podium to share the credit. As leaders of competing genome projects, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, were recognized, correctly, as the two most important players in the worldwide effort to spell out the 3 billion "letters" of the human genome--the biochemical recipe, encoded...
Never one to keep his opinions quiet, Venter did two stints in the brig for refusing to follow orders. When he returned to the U.S., his laid-back surfer-boy mentality was gone. He signed up at the University of California, San Diego, and emerged six years later with a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology. Within a few years, he landed at the National Institutes of Health, where he began trying to locate and decode a gene that governs production of a brain-cell protein. The work was agonizingly slow, and when he heard about a computerized machine that used...
...coming in at a remarkable pace. In the months since Venter and Collins stood together at the White House last June, Celera scientists have rushed ahead and sequenced the genome of the mouse. Astonishingly, mouse and human genomes are almost identical, with only a few hundred genes separating the two...
...nature build two such different organisms from what is essentially the same blueprint? No one knows for sure, though scientists are formulating theories. One is that when a gene sets out to make proteins it can splice itself together in alternative ways; another is that some genes in man are left running longer than they are in a mouse--so that our bodies grow bigger, our brain cells more numerous and so on. "It's not as if a new kind of brain cell were invented 150 million years ago [when mice and men diverged]," says Robert Weinberg, a professor...
Venter will undoubtedly continue to irritate. He sparked a new controversy just two weeks ago by negotiating an agreement with Science whereby the prestigious journal will publish his genome sequence without insisting that he take the customary parallel step of uploading the data to NIH's GenBank website. Leaders of the competing genome project symbolically chastised Science by taking their own version of the genome to the rival journal Nature. But it's thanks to Venter, aggressive and hard-nosed as he is, that the world can read the score of the human symphony--and those of some 40 other...