McLennan, Alison; Rimmer, Matthew --- "Introduction: Inventing Life: Intellectual Property and the New Biology" [2012] ELECD 130; in Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison (eds), "Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies

Editor(s): Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802468

Section Title: Introduction: Inventing Life: Intellectual Property and the New Biology

Author(s): McLennan, Alison; Rimmer, Matthew

Number of pages: 36

Extract:

Introduction: Inventing life: intellectual
property and the New Biology
Alison McLennan and Matthew Rimmer

The Human Genome Project represented the first foray into `Big Science'
by the medical and the biological science communities.1 The initiative was
promoted as `the moon shot of the life sciences', the `holy grail of man',
`the code of codes', and `the book of life'.2 On 14 March 2000, United
States President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a
joint announcement of the sequencing of the human genome.3 In February
2001, Nature and Science published rival papers reporting the sequence of
the 3.2 billion base pair human genome. The Nature paper was by the
publicly funded International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium,4
while the Science paper was by the private company Celera Genomics ­ led
by J. Craig Venter.5
So what has changed in biological research since this milestone? In 2003,
Francis Collins and his collaborators reflected that the success of the
Human Genome Project has inspired a raft of new large-scale biology
projects: `Large-scale genomic enterprises now extend well beyond straight-
forward sequencing, as witnessed by the recent launch from our own funding
agencies of other large-scale biology initiatives involving functional genom-
ics, structural biology, microbial genomics and proteomics, and haplotype



1
Galison, Peter and Bruce Hevly (eds) (1992), Big Science: The Growth of
Large-Scale Research, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2
Cook-Deegan, R. (2001), `Hype And Hope', American Scientist, 89, 62.
3
...