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Steven Pete can put his hand on a hot stove or step on a piece of glass and not feel a thing, all because of a quirk in his genes. Only a few dozen people in the world share Pete's congenital insensitivity to pain. Drug companies see riches in his rare mutation. They also have their eye on people like Timothy Dreyer, 25, who has bones so dense he could walk away from accidents that would leave others with broken limbs. About 100 people have sclerosteosis, Dreyer's condition.
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Drugmakers are also investing in acquisitions and partnerships to get their hands on genetic information that could lead to more drugs. Amgen bought an Icelandic biotechnology company, DeCode Genetics, for $415 million in 2012, to acquire its massive database on more than half of Iceland's adult population. Genentech is collaborating with Silicon Valley startup 23andMe, which has sold its $99 DNA spit kits to 1 million consumers who want to find out more about their health and family history—more than 80 percent have agreed to have their data used for research. The Genentech partnership will study the genetic underpinnings of Parkinson's disease. And Regeneron has signed a deal with Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health System to sequence the genes of more than 100,000 volunteers.
Tough luck for the Icelanders who submitted their DNA altruistically.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @08:57PM
Humans should not play god. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, but because we have such a lousy record at it.
Were you intending to refute Stewart Brand? 40 years ago he said (in the Whole Earth Catalog), "We are as gods, we might as well get good at it".
Now he's saying, "...we are as gods and have to get good at it."
https://edge.org/conversation/we-are-as-gods-and-have-to-get-good-at-it [edge.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @11:50PM
I think the problem is that humans don't have the proper perspective to get good at being gods. I agree that we need to get better. We can fuse atoms together and break them apart, but out track record of responsibly using nuclear energy isn't that great. Our pharmaceutical companies are more interested in erectile disfunction and male pattern balding than malaria or ebola. And big agriculture couldn't care less about sustainable farming, it just plows ahead with dumping massive about of fertilizer into the ecosystem causing algae blooms and poisoning the water supply.
The sad fact is that short term all of these disproves are going to be used to pad the bottom line of multi-national corporations, and not the alleviate the suffering of use mere mortals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @03:37PM
I'd argue that ebola and malaria are unimportant to the majority of people, while curing limp dicks or baldness would be a boon to a large portion of the population. You get more value by slightly improving everyone's life a little bit than the lives of a minority a lot.