

Report finds that Human Genome Project has added $1 trillion to US economy - feelthepain
http://www.nature.com/news/economic-return-from-human-genome-project-grows-1.13187

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alexholehouse
> "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.

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akiselev
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.

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genwin
> 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
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.

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

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chuckcode
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](http://www.genomicglossaries.com/images/shenemangenome.gif)
[2]
[http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/](http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/)
[3]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/16ztsk/til_in...](http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/16ztsk/til_in_1991_when_president_bush_proposed_placing/)

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jongraehl
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
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.

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gmack
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.

~~~
marcosdumay
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.

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akiselev
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.

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spikels
Research by researchers says research spending well-spent.

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

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miga
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.

