A friend of mine is a senior researcher at Dyax (www.dyax.com/). I was telling him about the assignment we have for class this coming Monday (March 2). Below is his opinion on the matter.

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... with the advent of new sequencing techniques, mapping large fragments of unknown territory in different genomes is a lot easier nowadays. ESTs are still used so I’m not discounting their importance and I don’t think they should be patented. In fact, two novel orthologue genes (genes found in a different organism (in this case, rabbit and sheep) but are similar to that found in humans) that I started working on and my group completed were deciphered, sequenced, cloned and expressed because of ESTs. I don’t think we would have fished them out without ESTs. And knowing how they function allowed us to run animal experiments necessary for moving this potential [...] drug we have here. So, for sequences that are found in different organisms whose genome is not completely sequenced, I think ESTs are super important and should not be patented.



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So, one viewpoint. Not necessarily right or wrong, but one "from the field", so to speak.


-Alan