Is the quest for immortality the only thing that drives research like this? The PI's interviewed in the promo video for ENCODE ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsV_sEDSE2o ) can only point to biomedical implications to justify their continued funding.
Most of the people interviewed in that video are program officers/administrators at the NHGRI (an institute of the NIH) who oversaw the ENCODE project. They weren't researchers who did the work. The mission of the NIH is human health, so anything funded by them has to have a biomedical implication somewhere down the line.
I guarantee that the real impetus for the project in the researchers' eyes is to understand how an identical* instruction manual (ie., genome sequence) in every cell can give rise to a plethora of cells that do very different things to make a functioning dynamic human. In other words, for the most part, it appears that there's the sequence information and then there's how you use it. ENCODE (and modENCODE) are about how you use it.
fyi: I'm a researcher in the modENCODE consortium, a sister project to ENCODE, aimed at characterizing functional regions of DNA in two model organisms, a small worm and the fly. My PhD advisor was funded by ENCODE as well. I obviously find this stuff fascinating and important.
It used to be thought that ~95% of the genome was "junk DNA", i.e. DNA that was there either for evolutionarily historical reasons, or as the remnants of viruses or other mobile bits of DNA, but which no longer performed a significant function.
The principal finding reported by ENCODE is that the proportion of the genome which has no ascribed role has now dropped to 20%, 5% codes for "traditional" genes and 75% is this new stuff. A lot of that new stuff appears to be regulating the activity of the traditional 5%.
As to the motivations of the scientists involved, they will be a mixture of pure intellectual curiosity and the quest for cures to diseases. Of course they also would like to be paid, and must therefore dress some of their motivations in language likely to motivate their ultimate paymasters, i.e. the public.
This is the reality of biomedical research today. With NIH funding level flatlining in recent years and congress leery of more spending in anything other than military, medical utility is the mantra now within NIH. The irony is that most of ENCODE people are not medical researchers and are less qualified and less experienced than human genetics researchers. This is all about money. Scientists need to eat too. And reputation, and power. It is a very high-stakes game.
Agreed. While I think what ENCODE is doing is important, I feel that they oversold the value of their work. In my opinion, they obviously wanted to ensure continued funding.
It is not a bad thing that every once in a recession less fruitful areas of research are trimmed from funding to make room for more important work. To often scientist lose sight of why their research is important, and forget about trying to solve real problems. That said, too much money is poured into military research and not enough into basic science, which is what pays off in the long run.
This is the basic science that pays off in the long run. You can't just turn biomedical science projects on and off. It takes time and investment to develop the techniques and technologies to do this work, to gather the samples, and ensure data quality across the project labs. During the time that the ENCODE project was funded, the technology for doing the types of experiments to get this kind of data advanced many times. We are now talking realistically about personal genomics and the $1000 genome; at the project start we were still celebrating the 3-billion-dollar genome sequence.
Funny that we choose to make it asynchronously for technological reasons, but it makes sense on a lot of levels. I really am excited to push this to the next level so you could potentially make some real music with it.
