Genome website set up to help with sequence analysis
After PubMed Central and Biomed Central comes 'Human Genome Central' — a 'master website' being set up by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium to provide access to tools for analysing the sequence data being produced by its members.
The consortium says that although the raw sequence data are already available in three public databases — Genbank, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Database and the DNA Database of Japan — analysing this data is a daunting and time-consuming task.
The new website has therefore been designed to give users "comprehensive and comprehensible" ancillary information and tools. These should provide visitors to the site with a picture of the genome that is continually updated.
The information available will include the overlaps between clones, the location of each clone, an integrated sequence that merges the individual clones, and annotation of gene content.
Japanese doctors took brain samples without consent
Two doctors in the Tokyo medical examiner's office, who were revealed last week to have taken brain samples during autopsies without permission from the office or the families of the deceased, have pleaded ignorance of the need for consent. Since 1992, the two have taken nearly 100 such samples from people who had died of nervous diseases, passing them on to researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry.
A Ministry of Health official said that there were probably more undiscovered cases. But he added that the incident did not reflect any ambiguity in the regulations, and should not affect future research as it had not stirred up "the kind of public outcry and legal action that might happen in the United States".
'Healthy' cattle might still harbour BSE
Scientists from the UK Medical Research Council's prion unit have found evidence of a 'sub-clinical' form of BSE in mice, raising the possibility that apparently healthy cattle could harbour the disease. The researchers also found that prions transferred easily from hamsters to mice, a species barrier that was thought to be robust.
According to the Department of Health, the results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will be considered by the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee when it meets at the end of September. "Current measures to protect public heath were introduced on the basis that infection in animals and people may be present in the absence of clinical disease," the ministry said in a statement.
US climate change report comes under fire
Fifteen industry groups have joined forces to label an assessment of the potential consequences of climate change for the United States a "failure". They were especially critical of the initiative's recent report Climate Change Impacts on the United States, which discusses how global warming could affect different parts of the country (see Nature 405, 725; 2000).
The groups claim that the predictions play down the amount of uncertainty involved. The National Association of Manufacturers, American Farm Bureau Federation, American Petroleum Institute, US Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association are among those in the campaign.
