Most strikingly, Mr Gore is interested in science: his famous concern for the chemical balance of environment is matched by similar passions for the Internet, the genome map, new research on learning.
The Plant Genome Research Road Map, as it's called, was unveiled at the Indian Science Congress in Chandigarh.
As well as leading China's contribution to the human genome sequence and working with Danish partners on the pig genome, this week the institute announced completion of a detailed map of the rice genome.
Stefansson marvels that anyone would try to put together a "finished" genome without a recombination map to serve as a guide.
Both firms were among the first to use computerized databases to scan the genome-the "map" or blueprint of 25, 000 or so active genes that contain the code for the body's proteins.
Finding those rare transcripts could provide some advantage, although Rathmann admits that an accurate map of the genome would allow anyone to find genes very quickly.
Part of its "Smarter Planet" initiative, one of the vignettes describes how some do-gooders used IBM software to map the rice genome, identifying what was killing crops and helping to end hunger.
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She likes to note that the effort to map the human genome began as a government project, and has been taken over by private efforts now that the commercial potential has become obvious.
When scientists embarked on the 13-year journey to map the human genome in 1990, they envisioned a future in which the knowledge of DNA would aid in the diagnosis, treatment and even prevention of thousands of diseases and disorders.
For instance, MIT's Eric Lander founded Millennium Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: MLNM - news - people ) in 1993, but that didn't stop him from being a major force in the academic effort to map the human genome.
The more accurate map of his genome, published Tuesday in The Public Library of Science, an online journal, is most important because it is going to help scientists make many more such maps--and because it opens the door to people being willing to have their genome's sequenced.
We have a map of the human genome and new ways to produce renewable energy.
Kamionkowski compared the Planck map to the Human Genome Project in terms of its importance for cosmology.
Venter was the first to precisely map an entire human genome.
Vertex argues that the rapid-fire method, which it dubbed "chemogenomics, " is the best way to keep up with the flood of promising data resulting from the map of the human genome.
They were analyzed with advanced versions of the DNA-sequencing machines used to map DNA in the Human Genome Project.
And the map-ping of the genome let scientists decode the genetic blueprint of new viruses like SARS, the virus that swept China in the spring, in a few days.
To build on a metaphor used by Eric Green, the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, this is like a map of a coastline drawn by an explorer who has not made landfall.
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The map attempts to link features of the genome together, based on how frequently they are separated by crossing over.
Celera genomics began life as the swashbuckling mapper of the human genome, but it never could find the profit treasure buried in that map.
Case in point: On Monday, DeCode Genetics published an important genetic map--assembled by methods very different from those used to create the sequence of the human genome--that will make it much easier for scientists to hunt down new genes linked to disease.
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