China was the only developing country to play a role in the sequencing of the human genome, which was published in 2001. As director of the Beijing Genomics Institute since 1999, Huanming Yang was a key player in this effort. Since then, Yang's group in China has published the complete genome sequence of Indica rice and the silkmoth, and steady progress is being made on the genomes of other commercially important species, including the chicken, pig and soybean.
Yang and his team also made international headlines when they announced that they had sequenced the genome of the SARS virus in just a few days. Information derived from the sequence led to the development of diagnostic kits for the virus that greatly facilitated the control of the disease throughout China.
Currently, Yang and other scientists at the Beijing Institute of Genomics are working on another project linked with the human genome as part of the International HapMap Consortium. The aim is to compare the genomes of three different races of human beings and to identify all the single base substitutions in blocks of DNA (or haplotypes) between them. Scientists believe that these variations are at the root of such ailments as heart disease and asthma, the incidence of which varies between races.
Yang has also promoted science for developing countries in developing countries, and promotes the ethical use of genomic data and open access publishing for all the information generated at the Beijing Institute of Genomics.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/26/2005 06:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
