The Human Genome Project essays

The Human Genome Project essays At the beginning of the project, the Human Genome Project was compared to the Manhattan Project or the mission to put men on the moon. It was considered so broad and so complex that the funding could only come from the government. The Human Genome project is now in the hands of private labs. Those labs have forced the Human Genome Project into a rush to finish first. The Human Genome Project is a task that wishes to document all of the genes (over 100,000 of them) in the human body. From these genes, scientists want to find out specifically what their function is and they want to find out what malfunctions in the genes may trigger diseases such as cancer or heart disease. Scientists began the project about 10 years ago and they hope to finish around 2003 with a rough draft around 2001 instead of the 2005 predication several years ago. The reason for moving up the date is the rapid competition of the private labs. The problem with the competition is that these labs want to patent the genes that they have discovered. It is not as if they want to patent the process to sift flour, they want to patent the flour! Did the guy who first found the gallbladder in a human, patent the gallbladder? No, he did not! No one person should be able to have ownership over some information that every single human being has, nor should he/she be able to make money by selling it. If a lab were to own part of a gene, no independent scientist could use the information if he did not have sufficient funds to buy the information. All future control in anything dealing with genes would go to large research teams at labs. Until recently, most scientists were independent and they contributed to the whole, bringing in different ideas and theories from everyone. If only a few laboratories could control the information in genes, the basis of science as we know it will be gone. When the Human Genome Project gets to a point where every person c...