Human Genome Project
Return on Investment
12/06/13 16:28 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
A new report from United for Medical Research and Battelle claimed that while the US government invested about $14.5 billion between 1988 and 2012 in the Human Genome Project, it has reaped $59 billion in tax revenue and $965 billion in economic impact. The report further suggests that the investment has lead to 53,000 genomics-related jobs and $293 billion in personal income. S. Pelech notes the timing of the release of the report with the reduction of NIH research funding through the sequestration, and challenges some of the conclusions of the study. He notes that there has been essentially no growth in employment in any of the various genomics sectors in the last 5 years. Read More...
A Good Return
14/02/13 16:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
In his recent State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama made mention of how for every dollar the US government invested to map the human genome, $140 was returned to the US economy. This was based on a 2011 report by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, which calculated the direct, indirect, and induced impacts of human genome sequencing on employment, personal income, output, and tax revenue. S. Pelech challenges the accuracy of these estimates and pointed out that private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects really made the major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have been targeted by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry to date. He also takes issue with the claims of the actual direct economic and scientific benefits of the Human Genome Project. Read More...
The Genome and the Economy
18/06/10 13:34 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Mike Mandel at Mandel on Innovation and Growth has blogged that after a decade, the Human Genome Project has failed to deliver medically significant results, but he is optimistic that a significant economic impact will emerge over the next 5 to 10 years. S. Pelech argues that the true dividend from the sequencing of the human genome will not materialize until we can make sense of what all of the expressed proteins and functional RNA oligonucleotides are actually doing, but instead current efforts remain fixated on continuing to sequence the genomes of hundreds of different species and thousands of different people. Read More...
Reports Tout Return on NIH's Investment
13/05/11 05:28 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
A new report from the advocacy group United for Medical Research, and authored by economist Everett Ehrilich predicts that "the gene sequencing business will grow by 20 percent a year and become a $1.7 billion industry by 2015. According to a separate report authored by the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute, the National Institutes of Health's $3.8 billion investment in the Human Genome Project, along with subsequent capital provided by the government and the private sector, generated a total return of roughly $49 billion in direct and indirect federal tax revenues over the last two decades or so. S. Pelech questions the validity of estimates of the economic benefits from the direct investment of the NIH in the Human Genome Project (HGP), especially since private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects made major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have actually been targeted by the industry to date. Read More...
The Human Genome Bubble
17/03/10 11:44 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
The Human Genome Project generated high expectations, which spurred the US government to invest in the effort, which some argue catalyzed long-term investments by the private sector. S. Pelech argues that industry actually led the way to whole genome sequencing, and that since then insufficient followup work on the proteins encoded by genes has handicapped the potential of the Human Genome Project to yield better diagnostic tools and therapeutics. Read More...