Well. . .not as right as you’d think. The big splash of cold water, at least as I remember it, was when the Human Genome Project folks announced the total number of human genes, and it came in way below what some people had been estimating – like, ten times less. If you added up all the genes that people had claimed to have filed applications on up until then, it was well in excess of the number of genes that turned out to actually exist. This embarrassing patent excess was one problem (some of which could be explained by multiple filings by different companies), but the unexpectedly small number was the other one, and the more worrisome. How could there be so few genes when we knew there there were a lot more proteins than that? And so the importance of post-translational processes finally began to be appreciated by a wider public. It wasn’t “one gene, one protein” – it was “one gene, a bunch of proteins, and we’re not sure quite how or quite how many”.
Another set of problems came on a bit more slowly. The companies that did the whopper genomic deals came to realize that (1) even 50,000 genes was rather a lot, when you had no idea what most of them did, what pathways they fit into, what diseases they might be associated with, and what might possibly happen if you found a compound that affected their associated proteins, and (2) it didn’t look as if we were going to even get a chance to find out about that last part, because most of these things came up empty when you screened against them anyway. These were (and are) all major problems. We still have only fuzzy ideas of what a lot of genes actually do, and we still have a terrible time finding useful chemical hits against a lot of our new targets – more on these later; they’re perennial topics around here.
The whole thing is worth reading. I was happy to find out that most of those companies who rushed to patent human genes are likely to get nothing for their pains. I still think that it sets a dangerous precedent though.