Washington—At the end of a 3-day conference
last month on the ethical, legal, and social repercussions of the genetic
revolution, National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis Collins,
MD, PhD, launched into cheerleader mode, urging the assembled researchers
to design "truly exciting research agendas." He then rushed off to the White
House for a final meeting with President Clinton and the latter's closest
health advisors.
That Collins rated a place at the governmental head table is testament
to the grandness of the genome project and all of its spin-offs, an enormous
academic and industrial complex devoted to mining genomic ore for medical
gold.