Openness must continue if we are all to benefit

This week the innermost machinery of human life has been revealed - not once but twice over, with announcements that public and private sector efforts at sequencing the human genome are "in essence" complete. This puts human genetics on a similar footing to sciences such as astronomy, geology or ecology, where massive catalogues of raw data, compiled over many years, underpin systematic research.

Modern technology means that the Human Genome Project has taken less than a decade - and sequencing more than 50,000 genes has cost only as much as sequencing three or four would have a few years ago.

Part of this dizzying progress is due to improved laboratory methods. But much of it depends on information technology, whose databases underlie it and which allows it to be published worldwide and for free on the internet.

The simultaneous biotechnology and IT revolutions mean new challenges for the new century. Genomics will not solve many of the world's biggest problems, especially poverty in the developing world. But our approach to others, especially health, will change fundamentally. Bill Clinton may have been overdoing it when he said this week that young Leo Blair's life expectancy had risen by 25 years because of the genome announcement. But drugs and preventive therapies will improve steeply as their design becomes fully scientific.

Of the issues that remain unresolved, none is more vexed than the ownership of the products and technologies that flow from sequencing the genome. The genome may be open to all, but one does not become a millionaire by looking at the share price page in the newspaper. Treatments based on the genome will require massive capital commitments and are bound to be patented. But the award of a patent for showing what a gene does risks extending patent coverage from inventions, as now, to discoveries. As we report this week (page 32), this is a departure as yet not fully tested in existing law. It will doubtless also breed new legislation, and getting this right will be crucial.

The speed with which the genome has been completed is down to both openness - the Sanger model - and commercial opportunism - the Celera model. Balancing those tensions is not going to get easier. The academic community will rightly lean to the Sanger model, but it will be viable only if governments (as with the genome in the US) and charities (as has been the case in the UK) continue to support adequately people working in the open arena without demanding commercial return.