Douglas Steinberg | Sep 3, 2000 | 8 min read
Consider a scenario for the year 2002: Using commercially available software, bioprospector "Craig Collins" spends a day scavenging the Human Genome Project (HGP) database for the alternatively spliced genes prized by Wall Street. He enters the sequences of several candidate genes into a software package that prints out the likely functions of their protein products. One protein looks like it could be pharmaceutical paydirt, so he isolates the corresponding cDNA, inserts it into a vector, then