tailieunhanh - The Ethics and Governance of Human Genetic Databases European Perspectives Part 9

Tham khảo tài liệu 'the ethics and governance of human genetic databases european perspectives part 9', ngoại ngữ, anh ngữ phổ thông phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 228 Gardar Arnason the Human Genome Project has given rise to stronger rhetoric than the databases not least around the scientific breakthrough of the Human Genome Project which was fabricated for the media on 27 June 2000. When Newsweek published a story on the anticipated breakthrough more than two months before it took place it said And science will know the blueprint of human life the code of codes the holy grail the source code of Homo Sapiens. It will know Harvard University biologist Walter Gilbert says what it is to be human . 2 The rhetoric used for justification of both the Human Genome Project and human genetic databases relies in large part on a very simplistic deterministic view of genes which developed alongside the rise of genetics in the twentieth century but does not quite fit the view of genes in current science. The history of the concept of the gene is not very old. When Gregor Mendel published his laws of heredity in 1866 he called the carriers of hereditary traits simply While his paper lay largely unnoticed in Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brunn biologists were observing for the first time curious threads in the cell nucleus when the cell is about to divide. Observations in 1877 of cell division and of the formation of the ovum and the sperm cell soon indicated that the threads were likely involved in carrying hereditary traits. The threads were called chromosomes. In 1892 the German physiologist August Weismann claimed in his Das Keimplasma that the chromosomes consisted of particles which were the carriers of hereditary traits. He called these particles determinants. Only in 1909 were the carriers of hereditary traits named genes by the Danish Mendelian Wilhelm Johannsen 4 although he did not think they were particles. And as it turned out no such particles exist. Before the 1950s the interior of the cell nucleus was not well understood. Deoxyribonucleic acid DNA and ribonucleic acid RNA had been identified in the