WITH the ink barely dry on the first draft of the human genome, three
companies want to go one stage further. They have announced a $185
million plan to map the identity and function of every protein in the human
body—the human “proteome”.
“It’s our goal to complete the human proteome map in three years,” says Peter
Meldrum, president of Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City, Utah, the company
leading the project. Hitachi of Tokyo will provide computing hardware for the
task, while software will come from Oracle, the Californian computer giant.
There are worries about a private consortium…
