[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 142 (Friday, October 4, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1926-E1927]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    CONGRESSIONAL BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH CAUCUS CELEBRATES 50 BRIEFING 
                                SESSIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. GEORGE W. GEKAS

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, October 4, 1996

  Mr. GEKAS. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to inform my colleagues that 
since the beginning of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus in 
1990, until the last briefing of this Congress on September 25, there 
have been 50 briefing sessions for Members of Congress and their staffs 
on the latest cutting edge developments in biomedical research.
  Over the 6-year period, the Biomedical Research Caucus has developed 
a working relationship with the five scientific societies: American 
Society for Cell Biology, American Society for Biochemistry and 
Molecular Biology, Biophysical Society, Genetics Society of America, 
American Association of Anatomists and the Association of Anatomy, Cell 
Biology and Neurobiology Chairpersons, which compose the Joint Steering 
Committee for Public Policy [JSC]. JSC under the leadership of Dr. Marc 
Kirschner, chairman of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and with 
the scientific resources of the member societies established a 
committee, chaired by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harold Varmus, the current 
Director of the National Institutes of Health, to develop a biomedical 
research briefing program for the Congress. I am proud of the quality 
of the programs and the new opportunities in health care that are 
presented at the caucus briefings. Since Dr. Varmus assumed his duties 
at the NIH, we have been fortunate to have Dr. Michael Bishop, 
University of California, San Francisco, his former colleague and co-
prize winner of the Nobel award advise us on appropriate topics and 
speakers for the caucus briefings. This past year in 1996, Dr. Bishop 
suggested the caucus learn about issues involving: genetic testing, 
antibiotic resistance, mad cow disease, and us, how vision wires our 
brains and the potential for learning, the latest in new drug therapy 
that may prevent the HIV virus from becoming full blown AIDS and allow 
individuals to live productive lives, and how H Pylori is involved in 
ulcers and stomach cancer. We look forward to his suggestions for next 
year.
  This December, 1996, the American Society for Cell Biology at its 
annual meeting in San Francisco will give its Public Policy Award to 
Dr. Marc Kirschner, the first research scientist to receive the award. 
Previous recipients of the Public Policy award have been the Senator 
from Iowa [Mr. Harkin] and the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter] for 
their contributions to the field of biomedical research. I think it is 
fitting that scientific societies begin to recognize and reward the 
service and contributions that their members make to the public arena 
on behalf of biomedical research. Dr. Kirschner has served the Congress 
well in beginning the briefing series and bringing all his colleagues, 
specifically Dr. Varmus and Dr. Bishop to our attention. Once again, 
Dr. Kirschner has served the Congress well in securing a replacement 
for his leadership of the JSC societies, Dr. Eric Linder, Director of 
the Whitehead Institute Genome Center at MIT. For the last year Dr. 
Lander, a member of the Genetics Society of America, has succeeded Dr. 
Kirschner, as chair of the efforts of the five societies of the Joint 
Steering Committee, which continue to provide us excellent advice and 
guidance on the latest developments in biomedical research. Over the 
years the caucus briefing series has developed a reputation for 
excellence and an audience among the Congress from the Congressional 
Research Service analysts to professional staff of the health and 
related Committees of the Congress. Two years ago the caucus hosted a 
briefing presentation by NASA, which was beginning its biology research 
on the Space Lab and in attendance was astronaut Shannon Lucid, the 
current American with the longest flight in space and her replacement 
in space John Blaha. We are able to bring these issues to the Congress 
by using the noon hour for briefing meetings because of the 
contribution of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental 
Biology, which cooperates with the Joint Steering Committee in this 
service.
  We look forward to working with Dr. Lander, who was recently featured 
in a New York Times profile of a scientist at work, ``Love Of Numbers 
Leads To Chromosome 17''. Dr. Lander is an amiable adviser who brings 
the unique perspective of a mathematician to the work of genetics and 
biology. I commend the attached article about Dr. Lander for your 
reading and inspiration:

               [From the New York Times, Sept. 10, 1996]

                 Love of Numbers Leads To Chromosome 17

                          (By Philip J. Hilts)

       Cambridge, Mass.--In the career of Dr. Eric Steven Lander, 
     as in the new branch of biology known as genomics, the life 
     of numbers and the numbers in life have come together.
       Dr. Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/M.I.T. 
     Genome Center here, is a leader in constructing a complete 
     catalogue of the human DNA code or genome. But he did not 
     arrive at this position in the traditional way--for example 
     with a degree in biology. Only when past 30 did this curly 
     haired and energetic figure first crack a book in biology.
       Rather, he grew up in the thrall of numbers. As a high 
     school mathematics whiz, he was on the United States high 
     school team that came in a close second to the Soviet team in 
     the world mathematics Olympiad in 1974. He later trained as a 
     pure mathematician at Princeton University. Only then did he 
     fall in love with biology, as he spent hours talking with his 
     brother, Arthur, a neurologist.
       Biology itself has also been undergoing change in recent 
     years. The old style of academic biology is now admitting a 
     brash new branch of inquiry, one that is information-heavy, 
     computer-driven and closely allied to business. And for Dr. 
     Lander, that has been perfect. When he emerged from his 
     personal transformation, there he was, at the leading edge of 
     molecular biology.
       He established his credentials in biology by tackling 
     subjects that could only be approached by someone with a 
     strong background in mathematics, like how to analyze 
     statistically whether a disease may be caused by one or many 
     genes, and how to ferret out the different contributing 
     genes.
       In August, a team led by Dr. Lander found a gene that 
     contributes to type 2 diabetes, a disease caused by many 
     genes, each with many variants. Dr. Lander's strategy began 
     with the calculation that elusive genes are easier to 
     identify in isolated populations, where people are descended 
     from only a few founders and have not accumulated the many 
     genetic variations of more cosmopolitan groups. He searched 
     for the diabetes gene among a group of people in the Bothnia 
     region of western Finland where few outsiders have migrated 
     in the last 1,000 years.
       When biologists began to consider the task of making a 
     complete catalogue of the entire three billion letters in the 
     human body's DNA code, Dr. Lander's work made him a natural 
     candidate to lead one of the several teams of DNA sequencers.
       Craig Venter, head of the Institute for Genetics Research, 
     a private concern in Rockville, Md., a competitor of Dr. 
     Lander in the race to sequence genomes, said: ``In sequencing 
     whole genomes the breakthrough has been mathematics, applied 
     math and new algorithms. These are the kind of things Eric is 
     good at.''
       At the Whitehead Institute/M.I.T. Genome Center, Dr. 
     Lander's group has produced the first genetic maps of the 
     human and mouse genomes, a necessary step toward working out 
     the complete DNA sequence. His laboratory is one of several 
     that are financed by the National Center for Human Genome 
     Research in Bethesda, Md. The consortium of laboratories had 
     planned to complete the full DNA sequence of the human genome 
     by the year 2005 at a cost of $3 billion, but is already two 
     years ahead of schedule and below budget. The project has 
     already identified many genes of medical interest and 
     prompted investments by several companies.
       Dr. Lander, 39, was born and raised in Brooklyn in a family 
     of lawyers. As student at Stuyvesant High School in 
     Manhattan, he was sent one summer to participate in an elite 
     mathematics program, where the students decided that 17 was 
     the most interesting of all numbers. They formed a 17 club 
     and made up a T-shirt emblazoned with amazing facts about the 
     number 17. Dr. Lander can still quote examples: ``Many 
     multisided figures are stable when set down any one of their 
     sides, for example, a pyramid. But did you know that a 17-
     sided figure is the only one that is stable on one side 
     only?''
       Recently, the number 17 has sneaked back into his life. The 
     Whitehead genome center has chosen human chromosome No. 17 as 
     the one it will sequence as its contribution to the Human 
     Genome Project.
       ``Someone suggested I had picked chromosome 17 because of 
     my fascination with that number,'' Dr. Lander said. ``That's 
     not really true, but I am thinking of taking the old T-shirt 
     out of the closest. I still have it.''
       As Dr. Lander followed his instincts, his career took some 
     sharp turns, from pure mathematics at Princeton and Oxford, 
     to managerial economics at the Harvard Business School. Then, 
     while teaching mathematically oriented business classes by 
     day, at night he crossed the Charles River to hang out in 
     biology laboratories.
       He had begun to see that beneath the surface of the two 
     very different disciplines of mathematics and biology there 
     lay some

[[Page E1927]]

     links of possible importance. Biology, however chaotic it 
     might appear, had regions that he felt would yield to the 
     firepower of mathematical methods. His first few papers 
     exploring mathematical approaches to biology were 
     sufficiently remarkable that he won a MacArthur Fellowship, 
     the so-called ``genius'' award. ``That grant was crucial for 
     me,'' he said. ``I was struggling to establish myself at the 
     interface of math and molecular biology. Why should anyone 
     take me seriously? The MacArthur gave me that essential 
     credibility.''
       The $250,000 grant helped finance travel to the far-flung 
     and isolated human populations where he knew gene-hunting 
     would be easier.
       Dr. Lander soon started to make an impact in molecular 
     biology, creating the mathematical tools to tease out a major 
     gene in asthma, and a ``modifer'' gene that can suppress 
     colon cancer. But eventually he tired of hunting down genes 
     in the genetic jungle, one by one. ``That time is over,'' he 
     said. He is now laying plans for the next era in biology, in 
     which he foresees that the entire set of human genes and 
     their functions will be available on one CD-ROM disk, so 
     there will be no more Stanley-and-Livingston searching.
       ``Now, suddenly, biology is finite,'' he said.
       ``The genome project is wholly analogous to the creation of 
     the periodic table in chemistry,'' Dr. Lander said. Just as 
     Mendeleev's arrangement of the chemical elements in the 
     periodic table made coherent a previously unrelated mass of 
     data, so Dr. Lander believes that the tens of thousands of 
     genes in present-day organisms will all turn out to be made 
     from combinations of a much smaller number of simpler genetic 
     modules or elements, the primordial genes, so to speak. He 
     theorizes that these modules helped carry on life in the most 
     primitive cells living on the planet three billion years ago. 
     The basic functions of the life carried out by the first 
     genes must all have been formed very early in evolution, Dr. 
     Lander surmises. Most present-day genes are variations on 
     these few original themes, he said.
       ``The point is that the 100,000 human genes shouldn't be 
     thought of as 100,000 completely different genes,'' Dr. 
     Lander said. ``They should be thought of as maybe a couple 
     hundred families that carry on essentially all of life.''
       Making such a periodic table for families of genes will 
     define a new direction for biology, in Dr. Lander's view. The 
     completed table would mark the end of structural genomics, 
     the analysis of the structure of genes. ``When you get the 
     last base of the genome, driven in like the golden spike in 
     the transcontinental railroad, we'll maybe have a big 
     ceremony,'' he said. ``But when it's done, it's done.''
       Then comes what Dr. Lander calls functional genomics, or 
     making practical use of the table. For example, Dr. Lander 
     says, biologists may learn to read human DNA so effectively 
     that laboratories will quickly be able to tell patients all 
     the important variations they have in their entire gene set, 
     or genome. Further, it should be possible to tell which of 
     those genes are turned off or on at a given moment, thus 
     getting a picture of whether the cells of the body are up to 
     snuff.
       ``So here's the manifesto for the era of functional 
     genomics,'' Dr. Lander said.
       ``One. At the DNA level we want the ability to re-sequence 
     an entire genome--anybody's genome--in a regular medical 
     setting, to find all the variations. Because you and I differ 
     in one-tenth of 1 percent of our bases, and that accounts for 
     our differences.
       ``Most genes will have two, three or four major variants, 
     If you have 100,000 genes, that means there will only be 
     about 300,000 major variants. It's a finite number. We can 
     then take that list, and then correlate all the different 
     variations with health outcomes. You could take the 
     Framingham Heart Study and find the rate of each disease 
     associated with each of the 300,000 variants of genes.''
       That would allow each person to get a full list of what 
     disease they are most at risk for, based on their 
     inheritance.
       With a mix of hope and skepticism, he said: ``In principle, 
     that would allow us to have personalized health care and 
     personal health care strategies. In practice, of course, 
     whether we do that will depend on what we as a society want 
     to pay for, and how much we can protect our privacy, and so 
     on.''
       ``Two,'' he said, holding up fingers to signal the next 
     item on his manifesto. ``We want to be able to monitor gene 
     expression.'' Finding out which of an individual's genes are 
     active at any time would help indicate a body's response to 
     drugs, dieting, exercise and other factors.
       ``All this is not so crazy as it sounds,'' Dr. Lander said. 
     ``Less crazy, in fact, than the genome project itself. There 
     are already genetic `chips' that can make these things 
     possible.''
       He was referring to one of his favorite new technologies, 
     which has put human genes on microchips. Genes in a blood 
     sample can be matched against the standard ones on the chip 
     to see if there are any important abnormalities.
       So far, one company making ``gene chips,'' Affymetric Inc. 
     of Santa Clara, Calif., has succeeded in putting all the 
     genes of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, on a chip for 
     such comparison. The company has plans to put 30 to 40 human 
     genes on one chip, and ``in principle at least,'' said Robert 
     Lipschutz of Affymetrix, ``we should be able to put all human 
     genes on a chip.''
       Dr. Lander has a piece of that company, as well as a major 
     financial interest in Millennium, a company that intends to 
     make use of the data from the genome project to design 
     diagnostics and treatments of disease.
       If there is a danger sighted ahead in the ``new biology,'' 
     some critics suggest, it is that businesses may be too close 
     to science, and may even sometimes be in the driver's seat. 
     Scientific judgments may too often yield under pressure from 
     business needs.
       Dr. Lander, an avid businessman, takes these problems more 
     seriously than most people in science, said Dr. Francis 
     Collins, director of the Federal genome project. Dr. Collins 
     credits Dr. Lander with leading the way to help solve at 
     least one of the problems--that of hoarding data to gain 
     business advantages.
       The Whitehead genome center, at Dr. Lander's direction, 
     puts out on the Internet all the data it produces on DNA 
     markers and sequences, which are freely available to anyone 
     who wants to copy the material.
       At first the M.I.T. laboratory's data were posted every few 
     months, and soon they will be disseminated almost daily, Dr. 
     Lander said. ``This work is paid for with public money and 
     it's got to be made public as fast as we can,'' he said. 
     ``That means breaking with tradition and getting it out there 
     long before it can be published in scientific journals.''
       The effect he says, is highly stimulating for biologists. 
     ``We get 50,000 to 100,000 hits on our database per week. 
     People need this data.''
       The Federal genome project office has begun to follow his 
     lead, and those receiving grants must now make their data 
     available at least every six months.
       The task over the next few years for those leading 
     molecular biology will be to get biologists away from their 
     traditional tools--pipettes, gels and flasks--and into 
     analyzing gene function with computers.
       ``In the next one to three years, we have to figure out how 
     to get humans out of the loop,'' he said. ``Then we can 
     really get to work thinking about biology and what's going on 
     in life.''

                          ____________________