He says that when whole-genome sequencing arrives, single-gene patents will be of no use.
It remains to be seen whether the plummeting costs of gene sequencing will render expensive single-gene tests obsolete.
FORBES: Do-It-Yourself Gene Testing Threatens Myriad's Monopoly
Strohman was saying this in the face of tremendous hype over gene transplantation and the development of single-gene targeted drugs like Herceptin, Erbitux, Gleevec, Iressa, that have largely been disappointing and very costly.
Either way, the impact on their vision is so similar that it's considered one disorder, red-green colorblindness, which is the most common single-gene disorder in humans, affecting 1 in 8 men and 1 in 230 women of Northern European descent world-wide (and slightly fewer in other racial groups).
Some 600, 000 Americans have a less severe version caused by one defective copy. (There would be more of the double-gene victims if they didn't die young.) To get its drug approved Isis will need to study 45 patients with the severe two-gene form and a few hundred with the single-gene disease.
When Celera signed up Compaq in 1998, the company put a great deal of importance on the ability of various supercomputing systems to run a single gene-mapping program.
At the time scientists inside and outside the EPA unanimously agreed that the test posed negligible risk. (I wrote the analysis submitted by the Food and Drug Administration.) No new genetic material had been added--only a single gene whose function was well known had been removed--and the organism was obviously harmless.
Geneticist Thomas Johnson, now at the University of Colorado, showed that altering a single gene, called age-1, doubled the worms' term of life to one month.
Correcting malfunctioning genes could perhaps cure diseases linked to a single gene, such as sickle-cell anemia.
But Volvox shows the sort of thing to look for: a gene that stops reproduction in single-celled creatures and has been co-opted to do a new job.
For instance, Epogen, made by Amgen (nasdaq: AMGN - news - people ), was derived from a single gene sequence.
Wonders such as mass-produced insulin, cancer-fighting drugs, pest-killing crops and glowing fish--they're simply the result of moving a single gene from one organism to another.
FORBES: Drew Endy aims to reinvent the biotechnology industry.
After years of controversy, gene therapy is poised to become a viable option for a variety of often life-threatening medical conditions, especially those resulting from a single defective gene.
Yet, as the National Academy of Sciences has noted, this method is far more unpredictable than inserting a single gene from another species, as was done to produce insect-resistant corn, soybeans and cotton.
But the reality is that many parts of the brain work together to produce speech and no single gene, region of the brain or theory can explain successful language-learning.
ECONOMIST: What makes some people learn language after language?
But everyone gets two copies of the gene--one from each parent--and even a single M scuttles any hope for a magical career.
This type of crowd-sourced gene analysis could be highly accurate, perhaps more so than a single company gene test where you have no way of knowing if the company has made a mistake.
FORBES: Do-It-Yourself Gene Testing Threatens Myriad's Monopoly
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