Sailing Away For Genetic Discovery
Christopher Columbus sailed away in 1492 to discover a new route to reach Asia. Joint rulers of the nation conquering the Moorish kingdom of Granada fund Christopher Columbus' expedition hoping that they would run away Portugal's lock on Africa and the Indian Ocean reaching Asia by travelling west. Columbus never reached Asia. After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean for 10 weeks, land was sighted by a sailor called Rodrigo Bernajo. Columbus himself took the credit for this sighting. He landed on a small island in the Bahamas which Columbus named San Salvador.
What he found what was to the Europeans a New World: America. He did not came to America what he aimed for. America was what he got.
The $3-billion human genome project was formally founded in 1990 by the United States Department of Energy and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and was expected to take 15 years. In addition to the United States, the international consortium comprised geneticists in China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. With private fund back up Craig Venter as also on the mission but on a different route. He was sequencing everything in parallel. Ongoing shut gun sequencing largely due to the efforts of Craig Venter led to the announcement of the essentially complete genome in April 2003, 2 years earlier than planned.
After his expedition of human genes Carig Venter sailed away for new discoveries in the ocean. He sailed along east cost of USA in Atlantic and equatorial Pacific Oceans. He collected samples of Ocean water at approximately 200 miles (320 km) intervals along the eastern North American coast through the Gulf of Mexico into the equatorial Pacific and mass sequenced these samples.
We do not know what he was particularly aiming for. He definitely was backed up with investors money. May be he was looking for photosynthetic genes for industrial scale solar energy ? Or he was looking for gene variants as indicators of sub oceanic oil reserves ?
But what the history of big scale ocean expeditions tells us is that you often sail away for not you are aiming for. Mr. Venter's data analysis is not 100% finished yet. God knows what will be found on the 60 billion DNA fragments he has discovered.
Original expedition article.
The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling
Expedition: Northwest Atlantic through
Eastern Tropical Pacific
PLoS Biol 5(3): e77. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050077
