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The most significant economic event of the past decade: Human genome project failure
Something a little different from our every-now-and-then Friday Weekly Wrap guest Mike Mandel.
He wrote an intriguing blog post the other day about the most significant economic event of the past decade: Not the dot-com boom and bust, not housing, not the financial crisis or the recession.
Try this: The failure of the Human Genome project to -- so far -- deliver medically useful results.
Think about how much we spend on health care every year, the logic's pretty good.
In his blog post, Mandel writes:
"Right now there are three depressing aspects to the current course of the U.S. economy. First, the growth of health care spending, if it continues, will put a stranglehold on employers and taxpayers. Second, the apparent inability of the private sector to generate well-paying jobs for college grads, if it continues, will put a squeeze on young workers. Third, the apparently inability of the U.S. to export enough to close a huge trade deficit, if it continues, will leave the country exposed to a dollar collapse and a sharp fall in living standards. I could have arranged and described these differently, but that's the outline of the negative picture.
The Human Genome Project had -- and still has -- the potential to be a powerful antidote to all three of these problems."
You can read the rest of Mandel's explanation for why he chose the human genome project as the most significant economic event of the past decade here.
Do you disagree or agree with Mandel?
Interesting? Yes. Important? Maybe. The most important economic event of the past decade? No. Not even close. To see the <b>true</b> most important event of the past decade, visit http://home.paonline.com/theobald/progress.pdf
The most important economic event of the past decade is the housing bubble. It has and will continue to change the way ordinary people live. It has taken out at least 15% of the economy, plus all the secondary effects of those who feed into or off of residential construction. It turned upside down assumptions people have been living under for at least thirty years. And it will overhang into the next decade, constraining our ability to respond to future problems.
As to the human genome project, to take a pure science effort and say that it is a failure because it hasn't delivered commercializable results within a decade is at best unfair. It would be like having said in 1957 that the transistor was a failure.
What would that be - providing kits that may or may not indicate the pedigree of a dog?
The matter is that this will be among many things purported to save lives and costs while improving the health and well-being for people but will be squelched by industry and political interests. One of the most terrible things to have happened over the last several decades, besides the influence of the military industrial complex, is to allow an industry to profit over human values. Insurance doesn't benefit the public good or provide remedies but allows people to capitalize from others misfortune while twisting the noble purpose of medicine into a market where advertisements lure and liabilities abound while patients suffer, not from inefficacy but because they don't want to lose a consumer.
The HGP may not be a failure but the crisis of values in this Corporate-Capitalist ideology driven era wouldn't ever allow the release of anything that would benefit the public good and hinder a profit-making opportunity.
I'll try to stay polite. The genome project is not a failiure. NCBI has achieved an amazing degree of organization of data. Research is blossoming. Just because you don't find the phrase,"human genome project" in a scientific publication doesn't obviate that the research was possible only with the support from the genome project.
I'm no expert on genomics, but I am a scientist in training. I think the conclusions from this article (and its title) are sad at best and misinformed at worst. Making a claim about failure without much proof is nothing more than flagrant journalistic (if it can be called that) sensationalism by Mandel. If a seasoned scientist were to say something like this it would be perhaps taken more seriously. The HGP is an important step in teasing out the biological mechanism of human disease. It provides reasonable map to our goal of uncovering the cause of human disease. No one expected the HGP to be a panacea and to suggest it would be is ignorant of fact and future implications of the work. Mandel would be better served (as would Market Place) in education lay people about the meaning of the information and what it HAS done so far. Perhaps Mandel should spend some time at a research institution with informed people and with the many patients who are suffering from incurable conditions, and educate himself a bit more before writing such nonsense.
