"Most dog breeds have really only been around since Victorian times, " said Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute's Dog Genome Project.

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But the work of turning the base pair data into the gold of new treatments has already begun, according to Dr Francis Collins, head of the US National Human Genome Research Institute.

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In 2003, Dr. Francis Collins and his team of researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health discovered the gene that causes this fatal disease.

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To build on a metaphor used by Eric Green, the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, this is like a map of a coastline drawn by an explorer who has not made landfall.

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Many of the responses involve running strands of DNA through tiny pores of one sort or another and Jeff Schloss, a programme director at the National Human Genome Research Institute (which is part of the NIH), reckons this is a particularly fruitful approach.

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As a result, the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust tightened access to these collections of DNA. The scientific community protested, but officials felt they had no choice because participants had been explicitly promised anonymity, said Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH.

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Collins, the force behind the mapping of the human genome and now the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, accused the firm of hijacking drug research with flimsy patents covering huge strips of so-called junk DNA, biological bits once thought insignificant but now central to the work of disease hunters.

FORBES: Magazine Article