John Sulston and Georgina Ferry: The Common Thread

By SIMON COLLINS*

A highlight of last year's "Knowledge Wave" conference in Auckland was a speech by Craig Venter of Celera, the company that had loudly trumpeted its success in sequencing the human genome.

It was a slightly embarrassing event. Venter, fresh from sailing his New Zealand-built yacht off the coast of New England, came on screen in a wharfside satellite hookup evidently expecting to be questioned rather than to make a speech.

But when he realised that a speech was expected, he spoke - about his boat, and about the amazing prospects for biotechnology, an industry in which his company was seen as the most successful in the world.

He was an inspiration for New Zealand's own biotech sector which, the Government has since decided, is one of our three best hopes for lifting our living standards into the top group of rich countries.

In The Common Thread, Venter appears in quite a different light. This is a remarkable book about how publicly funded scientists in five countries raced collaboratively to publish the human genetic structure for everyone to see it, before Celera had a chance to make money out of patenting it.

The apparent outcome was bizarre. Venter and Dr Francis Collins, head of the publicly funded US National Institutes of Health genome programme, stood on either side of Bill Clinton as he told the world in June 2000 that both groups had simultaneously completed mapping the genetic structure of our species.

John Sulston, who led the British part of the publicly funded team, says in this book that in June 2000, neither side had actually come anywhere near finishing a complete map of the human genome.

But Clinton wanted a public show of unity to stop Republican politicians complaining that the publicly funded effort was damaging to private enterprise in the shape of Celera.

When both sides published their still-incomplete findings in scientific journals eight months later, Sulston says that Celera had achieved virtually nothing beyond what the rival publicly funded group had already put in the public domain.

But the perception in the media, shared by that Auckland audience last year, was that Celera had "won". The perception was enough for Celera's advertisements to claim that it was "the world's definitive source of genomic information".

Sulston believes that Celera threatened "the whole future of biology".

"One company was bidding for monopoly control of access to the most fundamental information about humanity, information that is - or should be - our common heritage," he writes, with journalist Georgina Ferry.

It is hard to disagree with Sulston's conclusion that our patent laws need to distinguish more clearly between "inventions", whose inventors can rightly claim a return on the research they have done, and "discoveries", which merely increase our understanding of the natural world.

At present, the law allows our own Celeras to claim patents on "novel uses" of natural substances.

As Sulston says, a patent on an "invention" does not stop people creating new inventions.

But a patent on a gene sequence or natural substance, even if granted for a particular "novel use", has in practice made it difficult for other researchers to expand our knowledge about those genes or substances.

Enforcing that distinction would require the companies and countries which make discoveries - usually, of course, the rich ones - to give up the wealth that they could gain by charging poorer people for access to that knowledge.

But that, of course, is not quite what the organisers of the "Knowledge Wave" had in mind.

* Bantam Press, $64.95

* Simon Collins is a Herald journalist and science writer.