Nicholas Goldberg: Can scientists moonlight as activists — or does that violate an important ethical code?
A lot of the time when scientists start to get fired up about a scientific issue, they are likely to think of it as being important because it impacts the way in which they can pursue their work. That is why the discovery of the Human Genome Project was so momentous. It was clear, from the beginning, that it would generate both scientific excitement and also a wave of pressure for change.
The Human Genome Project, which came to fruition in 2003, is a perfect example. It involved a group of scientists from the United States along with about 100 others from 27 different countries, and had a budget of more than $3 billion. This project was the brainchild of human molecular biologist James Watson, who at the age of 37 became the youngest member of the American Physical Society.
As part of his work, Watson embarked on a project to map just about every DNA sequence in the human genome to an individual’s phenotype. This was done using the method of DNA sequencing, which involves taking a strand of a DNA molecule, and making it “cut” to the strand that contains the information on which each gene is based.
With this, Watson hoped to be able to then determine which genes would be involved in various traits. That information would be used to design drugs that could treat illnesses that cause the body to malfunction.
The problem with this project? Watson began having trouble getting access to the data files that had been collected by the Human Genome Project, and was thus unable to find out what genes would be involved in the disease processes he thought he was describing.
He realized that this was a serious problem. He then began looking for a collaborator that could help him with the problem: a scientist who would be willing to allow Watson access to not just raw DNA sequences, but the actual “junk” DNA sequences. That is to say, those sequences that are not involved in the actual DNA structure.
For the Human Genome Project to be achieved it was necessary to obtain the sequences of all of the approximately 30,000 genes that are in humans, and to know the exact sequences of all of the genes. However, in order to get those sequences, it was necessary to have access to the data that had been collected by DNA sequencing from human bodies. The DNA sequencing that was done at the time, which used
