Report finds that Human Genome Project has added $1 trillion to US economy

http://www.nature.com/news/economic-return-from-human-genome-project-grows-1.13187

by feelthepain • 13 years ago

73 16 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure the $$profits are because of dna finger printing technologies. No cures have been found.

miga• 13 years ago

Wrong. Genes could be easily compared with non-human homologs, and thus many possible drug target genes were found by similarity to other species.

Medical knowledge thus also benefitted from non-human sequencing projects.

alexholehouse• 13 years ago

"The question is: what health benefits have people got out of it, and what will they get in the future?"

Current health benefits have been largely minimal, relative to what was promised/expected (I'm actually not sure if anything was promised, so expected may be a more appropriate word). That being said, looking upon that as a failure is incredibly short sighted and one dimensional.

When the project was started, it was expected to bring about a semi-immediate revolution in medicine. As it turns out, many things relating to genes, genetic regulation, disease, etc. are more complicated than scientists had originally thought, which we discovered because of the human genome project, so this mini-renaissance hasn't really happened. However, to develop new techniques and approaches, new ways of thinking and understanding, we needed to know about this complexity.

Arguing that the HGP has failed patient care (in whatever metrics you choose) is the equivalent to punching a horse you bought to take you on an uncharted journey which turned out to be a lot longer than anticipated. You have to go the distance anyway, no one is to blame for the extra distance, and the horse got you a lot further than you would have on foot.

akiselev2• 13 years ago

I don't know what was promised but to expect results so soon from a project with such a massive amount of data isn't just short sighted, it's hypocritical and silly. The very public that will eventually benefit from the project are the ones who drive the economic and political forces that influence the speed of both preclinical R&D and the regulatory approval process. I believe the process from academic research to market drug is in the range of 10-20 years and that's the time it would take ONE drug that is based off of the human genome project to reach the market.

Furthermore, in order to really be able to effectively work with this much and this kind of information, to effectively hack and play around with it, we need to develop physical models. We need to simulate and study the effects of changes in the genome in a quantified and automated way which requires an even greater level of technology in cloning/in vitro organ growth (the latter of which seems to be steadily progressing every year).

We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the broad philosophical implications of genetic engineering as a civilization, yet alone be able to show drugs and therapies with years of use. The greatest years for the HGP are still to come.

gmack• 13 years ago

It would be interesting to see a comparative ROI study of several large, publicly-funded, projects similar to the HGP. Such data would be useful in debates about policy, one would think.

claudius• 13 years ago

One could start with the war in Afghanistan.

bjhoops1• 13 years ago

But of course we all know that the greatest ROI of all is tax cuts for the hallowed .1% job creators so they can continue creating jobs and wealth for the grateful masses.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

It would be interesting if that king of reporters started using actual return in their ROI numerator, not the investiment.

I'm quite tired of people claimming that building a bridge to nowhere incresed the economy just because the spending is added to the GDP. And the article uses exactly that kind of accounting.

akiselev2• 13 years ago

What? The HGP was tiny compared to the number of biologists, computer scientists, and entrepreneurs working in genetics research today, both public and private, funded by both taxpayers and investors collectively. The HGP was simply a loose organization that collected a massive amount of human and capital resources to map the genome. The research done in the project set the ground work and standard for much of genetics work today, not to mention propelled cheaper and faster sequencing technologies.

Myriad genetics is a $2.5 billion market cap genetics firm that built its entire company around only a small subset of the human genome (think dozens out of tens of thousands) and they got started a decade before the HGP did. That one company is just a small taste of what's to come.

It's only a bridge to nowhere if you can't see the future.

genwin2• 13 years ago

has delivered $178 [in private dollars] to the US economy for every public dollar spent

Fixed it for them. The report writer, Battelle Memorial Institute, can't be trusted to calculate the public benefit due to conflict of interest.

quesera• 13 years ago

You're pulling too hard in the opposite direction though.

10-30% of that will come back in corporate or personal taxes, which will be spent again on behalf of US citizens, which will again be taxed again, etc.

If the advantage is 178:1, eventually there has to be a gain.

genwin2• 13 years ago

But not nearly as much gain as investing directly in things for the general public.

spikels• 13 years ago

Research by researchers says research spending well-spent.

chuckcode• 13 years ago

I'm continually surprised at how short sighted people are when it comes to research and new fields. I'm sure these are the same people who couldn't imagine how a computer could possibly be useful for anything other than mainframe applications 20 years ago.

I get that the complexity of even understanding human biology is overwhelming[1] much less fixing it when it goes wrong. The reality is that the human genomic project kicked off a revolution in biology that has brought the price of sequencing down 100,000 fold per megabase of DNA [2] and that has opened up a whole host of applications. All life as we know it is based on DNA, many human diseases such as cancer are genetic diseases.

Have some vision, don't be like Senator Chuck Schumer who said that releasing DARPAnet (basis of internet today) to public domain would be a wast of taxpayer's money [3].

[1] http://www.genomicglossaries.com/images/shenemangenome.gif [2] http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/ [3] http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/16ztsk/til_in...

jongraehl• 13 years ago

It's hard to tell whether HGP was a waste of money (trying too early to do what would inevitably be cheaper years later) or whether it really got us to today, faster. Certainly many researchers were gainfully employed.

Obviously, we should expect that some portion of the funding actually had lasting value. But some of it was bridge to nowhere economic stimulus, scaling up old tech to cover an entire human genome (which obviously has some potential value as well - getting more people into the field, sooner).

astrodust• 13 years ago

One of the big reasons it got cheaper over time was because the early work made it easier refine and improve later designs. This is fundamental to most any technology.

A limiting factor was and remains compute power, but algorithmic improvements in bioinformatics outpaced Moore's Law.

Imagine what it'd be like if we were just starting to sequence the human genome now, still completely in the dark on these things. Yes, it might be less expensive, but you'd also be missing out on a decade of groundbreaking research.

The genome is like the worst program ever written, no comments, lots of duplicated code, full of bugs and hacks, and enormous in scale. We've spent the better part of a decade chipping away at understanding it and we're only just getting started.

It was absolutely the right time to do it. We could've started in the 1980s but the compute power wasn't there, but by the mid 1990s you had enough to get by. If you needed a gigabyte of memory you had to fork out, but it wasn't impossible like it would've been in the 1980s.

Report finds that Human Genome Project has added $1 trillion to US economy

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