The Washington Post reports, tongue in cheek, that the scientists have rejected car washes and bake sales in favor of several other approaches to getting the $3 billion they may need. It's clear those scientists have been paying attention to the Wall Street trendies. Among the ideas:
That last suggestion should make you squirm slightly as you smile, partly because something like it might indeed come to pass. But it also lays bare a central question that has gone unanswered—indeed, virtually unasked—in all the discussion of a project to sequence human genes. Joshua Lederberg posed it in these pages a few issues back (see The Scientist, November 17, 1988, p. 12): What is the human genome that is to be sequenced?
Molecular biologists need to consider carefully the social fallout attendant on the way that question gets answered. What might it say about science, and about Western society, if the ...
