It is complicated. The American system depends on people being able to sort of ward off the competition through patents and they won’t—the word is often that they won’t invest money unless they have that kind of protection. But the problem is, with DNA sequences, that it’s sort of like elements. It’s—you know, it’s information, we know it’s information. But we don’t know how to—the distance between that information and actually having something that will make money for somebody is enormous. And when you put a patent so deep into the system as onto the sequence itself all of a sudden you limit what everybody else can do with that sequence. You limit their motivation to do anything with it. Even if you’re an academic and you don’t want any money from it; you all of a sudden have to go through more complicated procedures to do it. Myriad Genetics in the BRCA 1 and 2 genes is a good example of the harm that can be done. I mean I think that there could be much more effective diagnostic procedures, much cheaper diagnostics developed, but they have a ring fence around that gene. And so nobody can do it. It’s important that they have the diagnostic—but they’ve got it so deep into the system that they prevent other explorations around it, and I think that’s the basic problem with DNA sequence is that it is so fundamental that the pathway from there to anything commercially useful is so indirect and so uncertain that it needs science and you can’t—science does not operate well with that kind of constraint.

Dr. Robert Waterston is a biologist best known for his involvement in the Human Genome Project. He has also served as chairman of the NIH’s Molecular Cytology Study Section and as a member of the NIH Advisory Council. He carried out his undergraduate work at Princeton University in 1965 and received both his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1972. His post-doctoral work was completed at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

In 1965, Dr. Waterston received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Princeton University. In 1972, he received an M.D. and a PhD in pathology from the University of Chicago. After his post-doctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he joined the Washington University faculty in 1976 where he is currently the James S. McDonnel Professor of Genetics, head of the Department of Genetics, and director of the School of Medicine’s Genome Sequencing Center, which he founded in 1993. In 2003, Dr. Waterston took on the role of Chair of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

In 1989, Dr. Waterston and John Sulston received one of the first grants for the Human Genome Project to sequence the nematode worm genome. His project saw so much success that Dr. Waterston received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute to carry out sequencing of the human genome at his laboratory. Dr. Waterston and Sulston became the first to completely sequence the genome of an animal, publishing the nematode worm sequence in 1998.

Dr. Waterston has received awards and recognition for his work including the Genetics Society of America’s Beadle Award in 2000, the International Gairdner Award in 2002, the Dan David Prize in 2002, the Alfred P. Sloan Award from the GM Cancer Research Foundation in 2002, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2005.