From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 22:36:47 MDT
Last night in Oz, the local ABC channel showed a half hour sob story
program about an irascible immunologist, Malcolm Simons, now dying of
cancer who decided years ago that `junk DNA' (introns) couldn't possibly be
junk, because it'd have been darwinnowed out. This is a strange error to
make, since it's obvious that hitchhikers *can* get lifts, but anyway. He
spent a lot of time starting around 1987 eyeballing shitloads of genome
code. In the 95% allegedly dud sequences he kept finding recurrent
stretches. Ah-ha! If the junk were *really* junk, that should all be
chaotic and random. (Another strange error, since the introns are thought
to be fossil virus code and the like which obviously was highly structured
to start with.) So he decided that the `non-coding' DNA must contain
control systems (hardly a startling thought, surely), and so he...
*patented access to introns in every living critter*. The company he helped
start, Genetic Technologies, now owns this access gateway, and is going
hard after all the other bio scientists throughout the world who wish to
use junk stretches for any purpose at all. Meanwhile, the guy fell out with
his partner and is now penniless and dying.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s898887.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s898887.htm#transcript
This has been... another Human Interest Story from the Frontiers of
Research and Commerce.
(There was damn-all science reported in the program, sorry. However,
there's some coverage of the 19th International conference on Genetics at:
http://www.abc.net.au/health/features/genetics/default.htm )
Damien Broderick
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