ENCODE
A Good Return
14/02/13 16:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
In his recent State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama made mention of how for every dollar the US government invested to map the human genome, $140 was returned to the US economy. This was based on a 2011 report by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, which calculated the direct, indirect, and induced impacts of human genome sequencing on employment, personal income, output, and tax revenue. S. Pelech challenges the accuracy of these estimates and pointed out that private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects really made the major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have been targeted by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry to date. He also takes issue with the claims of the actual direct economic and scientific benefits of the Human Genome Project. Read More...