But some human proteins are either too large or too complex for microbial cells to synthesize.
The first science project earmarked for Blue Gene is to model folding of human proteins.
For more than a decade, it has been possible to make pharmaceutically useful human proteins in genetically modified bacteria.
Nearly 27, 000 molecules are approved for pharmaceutical use, and the human genome project showed that there are at least 23, 000 human proteins.
The process is so labor intensive that researchers have sketched the structures of less than 2% of the 100, 000 or so human proteins.
In 1997 he founded American Pharmaceutical Partners to make cancer drugs disguised as human proteins, which reduces side effects while increasing their potency.
The treatment is produced transgenically - meaning that human proteins are injected into the genetic material of a sheep and collected through its milk.
And allied to cloning, this should allow PPL to set up whole flocks that can be pharmed for human proteins in an economically viable way.
From the brute steroids the East Germans reportedly used on their Olympians during the Cold War to today's man-made versions of natural human proteins, drugs have been as much a staple of the Games as gold, silver and bronze.
Pigs or indeed potatoes can produce human proteins for medical use (though none has yet received authorisation), foot-and-mouth vaccine can come from alfalfa, genes from enzyme-making bacteria can do the same job in tobacco, and useful new enzymes can be found and put into old bacteria.
But a lot of programming later he and his colleagues managed to build a model they hoped would be able to compare information on the structures of drugs with information on the structures of human proteins, in order to find the best fits between the two.
However, the line of attack can be perfected so that the proteins which coat human cells remain unaffected.
He vows to have a machine by 2012 that will decode in two hours all 20, 000 human genes that code for proteins. (This is roughly 3% of all DNA and will still be far behind Illumina, which can do all the DNA twice.) Eventually, he hopes to create a machine the size of an iPad.
Today nearly half the nitrogen atoms in the proteins of an average human being's body came at some time or another through an ammonia factory.
Also publicly available are databases loaded with information about many of the proteins found in the human body, and what sorts of molecules they tend to interact with.
The technology is being used by Myriad Proteomics , a joint venture with Hitachi and Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ), to try to map the millions of proteins found in the human body.
In my lab days, I always wondered about the wisdom of using nonoxynol-9 as a spermatocide because we used to use a related compound, octoxynol-9 (better known to labbies as Triton X-100), to break open human epithelial cancer cells to examine the proteins inside them.
Proteins are the workhorses of the human body, and most drugs work by interacting with them.
Diversa has attracted notice because of its unique method of producing human antibodies, which are disease-fighting proteins produced by the immune system.
Gene hunters have long focused on a mere 1.5% of the human genome, an estimated 25, 000 genes that code for proteins and thereby control the immune response, organ growth and brain activity, among other things.
The team, led by Giulia Biffi, a researcher in Balasubramaninan's lab, produced antibody proteins that were designed specifically to track down and bind to regions of human DNA that were rich in the quadruplex structure.
Driven by the idea that he might discover something totally new, he labored nights and weekends for months, filtering out thousands of other proteins until he finally separated the right one in 1989 and cloned the human version of the gene that produces it.
The team from the Human Nutrition Research Centre of Auvergne, in Clermont-Ferrand, France looked at the behaviour of proteins in muscle.
The biotech firm has said that it is taking steps to refocus its business on developing drugs from proteins and that it is looking at spinning off units such as using animal organs in human transplants.
Tooth enamel begins to form in the human embryo when a specialised layer of cells, called ameloblasts, in the embryonic tooth bud secretes amelogenin proteins.
Biogen and ZymoGenetics took a slightly different tack, creating therapeutic proteins that soak up excess amounts of BLYS. ZymoGenetics, working with partner Serono, has just begun human trials of its drug, TACI-IG, while Biogen and partner Genentech hope to begin human testing of their compound in 2005.
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