Shebang: What should we be afraid of?
Van Huffel: Well, we should be afraid of societal and economic interests in this field. One I can think is discrimination when it comes to a job, or health insurance.
Other potentially dangerous applications include - I don't link this particularly to how the genome works, but there are applications in the cloning area.
But maybe society can deal with the human ability to take control of the means of reproduction.
I would not say that there is a danger for society necessarily that we should be afraid of.
For example, cloning parts of individuals for therapeutic applications may sound bizarre, but I don't have personal objections to it.
Shebang: And what about the people who did it. This is now hailed as a huge discovery. As big as the wheel. Can you place it in context and maybe name some names. Of people you know who've done the deed.
Van Huffel: For the genome, there is the public consortium which is cordinated by Francis Collins: the UK, Japan, France and Germany and many other countries, I think in total 18 countries were involved in that effort there.
So they certainly deserve a large amount of credit for this.
But also Craig Venter at Celera Genomics which has challenged the approach by going in at a different angle in extracting the information, but in the end I don't think his conclusion or results will be so different from the public effort.
Shebang: Does it come down to who got there first.
Van Huffel: You see it's hard to say who got there first, because as a matter of fact, it's not finished! It's not completed.
It's 86% coverage of the human genome.
So at what level do you say it's completed?
Shebang: Well, they've announced it, now, that it's completed.
Van Huffel: Yes. But the completion says at 86% coverage so it's not completed, and it can only be completed for the first level when one individual is completely sequenced and the last nucleotide is fixed in there. But also 'completed' could mean much more, when all the variations in the genome - between individuals - on a global scale - an understanding of different ethnicities, between different disease susceptibilities.
So there is a broader question about completion of the human genome and the information extraction from it.
I hear claims- even by Craig Venter - that it may tackle a century to analyse it. I think it may only take 10, 20 years to extract the dominant aspects of it.
Shebang: In the last issue of Shebang [See archive] - Prof. Lewis Wolpert said: with the genome you've got all the words but you still can't put the sonnet together yet, to make it meaningful.
Van Huffel: Yes, exactly. The other analogy, less poetic, is: it's like having the phone book, and all the new names in the town, but not knowing what they do, what their business is, what's their job.
And how they'll inter-relate and connect to each other via other phone lines and other means. We're trying to take steps to understand the dynamics of genes.
How dynamic events, biological phenomena implicate genes that behave in a sequential wave of expression and how to understand the gene movie deploys itself when you follow an experiment. When you study a phenomenon.
Shebang: So, it's still a great day!
Van Huffel: Yes,it's a great day, and I think quite rapidly, it is going to be part of the normal context in which we work.
It certainly makes biology look to be a more complex field now.

A second researcher:

Dr. Petros Lenas: My reaction? About society?
Shebang: Whatever you like. However you feel.
Lenas: Nothing special. Everything is the same. It's like nuclear energy, or engineered tomatoes. I think at the time when we have a discovery, the expectations - although we are all fascinated at the beginning.

These discussions are quickly somehow incorporated into daily life and look so trivial. New medicines: 20 years ago they said, now we know which genes cause cancer, we will cure cancer. Two decades later, nothing happened. Now the expectations are being raised. But I am afraid this is something trivial - trivial in the sense that these findings will be incorporated in research activities, and the progress will be gradual and not as fascinating as we expect.
The same with nuclear energy. It didn't change the world- maybe in Japan
Shebang: Some would say nuclear energy nearly destroyed the planet and still threatens it.
Lenas: No, it didn't destroy the planet. We saw the danger and kept the balance. With tomatoes, we know about them, they're in the supermarket -
They're better, maybe.
Shebang: So you say it is a big step but it will be absorbed -
Lenas: It's a big step. It will be absorbed.

3rd Researcher

Researcher: The genome project? It is meaningless. It is nothing but a media stunt.

4th Researcher. An attempt at humour.

Shebang: You want to say something about the decoding of the human genome.
Researcher: It's been done
Note that this is the kind of thing which at Starlab counts as humour. If there's any amusement to be found in it, which is doubtful, it may lie in the swiftness of the reply.

CONCERNING THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT: e-mail us with your opinion