The Virginia conference is also hosting the first meeting of the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO). One of its founders, Ian Humphery-Smith, a professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, describes HUPO as an international effort to bring commercial and academic groups together to study the output of all human genes. Professing certainty that proteomics is "an ocean in which many can swim and possibly even help one another stay afloat," Humphery-Smith, who is also chief operating officer of the Dutch company Glaucus Proteomics, warns in an E-mail that the alternatives to cooperation are sabotage and self-interested competition.
Whence arises the sudden ferment in proteomics? Joshua LaBaer, director of the two-year-old Institute of Proteomics at Harvard Medical School and a member of HUPO's inaugural council, observes that genomics conferences have recently become "a bit of a scramble to figure out what the next step is, now that the genome ...
