The Race to Map Our Genes

Biologists, unlike physicists, are unaccustomed to gargantuan, gazillion- dollar research projects. So when American geneticists embarked on a $3 billion effort to map out all the hereditary information found on the 23 pairs of human chromosomes, they decided, like the proverbial tortoise, to take the slow and careful route. Plotting out a 12-year game plan, the geneticists subdivided the work among nine different laboratories so that eventually the scientists could pool their results in one highly detailed chart. Along the way, they have been trying to patent their discoveries, even before knowing precisely what their importance was.

But they did not count on the harelike speed -- and less mercenary mind-set -- of Daniel Cohen. An ambitious French geneticist, he has jumped ahead of his American rivals and is close to completing the first map of the human genome.

Cohen and his colleagues at the Center for the Study of Human Polymorphism in Paris will soon unveil their pioneering cartography. Thanks to a series of clever shortcuts, the French team's map will be available two years ahead of the schedule U.S. scientists set for themselves. Though somewhat rudimentary, Cohen's charts will make it easier for researchers to track down and isolate single genes scattered along the length of human chromosomes. "We don't want to say that we have beaten the Americans," the 41-year-old geneticist protests. "We like to compete, but not on a nationalistic basis." And yet he notes, "On this map, 90% of the work will have been done in France."

The U.S. government has tacitly acknowledged the French achievement by awarding researchers at M.I.T. $24 million to adopt Cohen's techniques. But the American effort has yet to emulate the most admirable aspect of the French effort: Cohen intends to donate his gene map to the United Nations as a gift to the world, thereby ensuring all scientists unrestricted access to the vital data. Cohen feels he owes this to the public because his work has been largely funded by public donations to a muscular-dystrophy telethon.

The federally funded U.S. project, led by the National Institutes of Health, has mounted a campaign to patent each DNA fragment that its researchers can reproduce, even before its usefulness is determined. The policy has been heavily criticized within scientific circles and figured in the abrupt resignation last spring of Nobel-prizewinning geneticist James Watson as head of the Genome Project. Cohen speaks for many critics when he names the two big problems with the NIH approach: "The first is moral. You can't patent something that belongs to everyone. It's like trying to patent the stars. The second is economic. By patenting something without knowing the use of it, you inhibit industry. This could be a catastrophe."

The initial maps under construction on both sides of the Atlantic will not identify every gene on every chromosome. Instead, the maps describe fragments of DNA arranged in the proper order as they would appear on the chromosomes. So far, researchers have identified a few genetic markers on each fragment: for example, the gene for Huntington's disease on a fragment of chromosome 4. In a later phase, they hope to crack the code of each gene -- a code that is written in chemical constituents called base pairs. The great challenge is the sheer size of the task. The human genome contains 3.5 billion base pairs.