Report adds to gene map momentum.

Report adds to gene map momentum

A special panel of the National Academy of Sciences last week released a report advocating the immediate initiation of a national effort to map the entire human genome. According to panelists attending the annual meeting in Boston of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the report reflects a growing consensus among scientists that the controversial, multibillion-dollar project should get under way. Important details about the venture have yet to be decided, money has yet to be allocated and dissent can still be heard from parts of the scientific community. But the months of sometimes heated debate that preceded the report's release appear to have resulted in a clearer sense of the mission, and the mood among molecular biologists and geneticists at the meeting was remarkably upbeat.

"It's obvious that we're going to go ahead with this," said James Watson, director of the Cold Spring Harbor (N.Y.) Laboratory, a member of the Academy panel and codiscoverer in 1953 of DNA's molecular structure. "The real question now is how the program is going to be managed."

The report recommends that a federal agency should be funded at $200 million per year for the next 15 years. Its charge would be to create a detailed map of all 50,000 to 100,000 genes that make up the human genetic blueprint (SN: 10/17/87, p. 245). Such a map is considered a critical first step in designing diagnostic tools and possibly cures for the estimated 3,000 inherited diseases in humans, and is expected to yield many technological benefits.

Notable for its absence from the report is a recommendation as to which government agency should take the leading role in organizing the project. The Department of Energy, which has been involved in some of the early gene mapping work, has expressed interest in spearheading the 15-year initiative. But several scientists who served on the Academy panel hinted that they'd prefer the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be in charge. The NIH has been hesitant to take a leading role, in part out of concern that the project would cut into its many other research missions.

The panel's proposal addresses these fears by specifying that the funding must be entirely new and not at the expense of other scientific research. But while that stipulation has quieted some opposition from the scientific community, it's not at all clear that a deficit-conscious Congress will be willing to allocate the money -- especially without evidence of strong scientific leadership. Congress last year allocated to NIH $17 million to start a genome mapping project in the current fiscal year, none of which has yet been spent. With NIH director James Wyngaarden due to appear before Congress in the next few weeks to present his request for next year's NIH funding, the agency must soon decide what role it wants to play in the genome project. In an effort to reach consensus on that important decision, Wyngaarden has asked the panel members to meet with him on Feb. 29.

While the leadership issue remains unresolved, other aspects of the report reflect a growing refinement of the project's strategies and goals. The panel recommends a gradual "scaling up" of the project, with initial emphasis on technological development of better tools to do the actual mapping. Indeed, much of the project is now being viewed as a technical rather than biological challenge, with biomedical benefits gradually accruing as the endeavor proceeds.

"This is not ordinary biological research," said Charles R. Cantor, of Columbia University, at a session of the Boston meeting. "It's much closer to engineering." A large part of the initial challenge will be to improve automated methods of analyzing DNA and to develop computers and software capable of dealing with the tremendous amount of information that will be generated.

Toward that end, experimental parallel processors and specialized computer chips developed for the Department of Defense are showing promise, said Leroy Hood, a researcher from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and a developer of some of the fastest DNA analyzers available. Hood revealed that a computer chip developed for spy satellites over the Soviet Union was being experimentally applied to the gene mapping prolbem. The chip was designed to filter out small amounts of useful infromation from large pools of extraneous data. He predicted that neural net research and experimental parallel processors capable of handling large amounts of information simultaneously would also be applied to the task of "teaching" machines how to recognize genes more accurately.

As foreseen by the panel, the gene mapping program would be coordinated by a single agency that would administer grants to individual laboratories at universities and research institutes. Addressing a major point of controversy, the report insists that all the results of genomic research be peer reviewed and remain in the public domain. In the past, some private companies doing gene mapping research have been slow to reveal their findings.

According to the panelists, laboratories outside the United States would be invited to join in the mapping effort, but only after the basic structure of the project had been decided. Some attendees at the session criticized the report for not encouraging other biotechnically advanced countries to share a larger part of the initial expense. Other critics said that despite the assurance that gene mapping would not cut into other scientific funding, it would almost certainly have an effect on funding for other pressing needs such as AIDS research.