Tokyo

Japan is considering placing human genome research on the agenda for the upcoming Group of Eight (G8) summit to be held in Okinawa in July. Members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last week expressed strong support for the joint statement released by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton calling for free access to raw sequence data (see above).

At a meeting on the life sciences last week hosted by LDP and attended by both scientists and politicians, Taro Nakayama, former foreign secretary and leader of LDP's science committee, called for the issues surrounding human genome research to be taken up at the G8 summit, and urged Japan to respond positively to the joint statement.

Keizo Obuchi, Japan's premier, is also said to be in support of this move to place the issues on the G8 agenda. He told the daily Nikkei newspaper that “it would be great if different countries decide to take a united approach [on the release of human genome data]”.

But the science-related ministries are wary of becoming involved. “Politicians are all for the free access of raw human genome data, but bureaucrats are extremely reluctant [to make a commitment to this],” says one leading genome researcher present at the LDP meeting.

Japan was approached by the US and British governments last year to take part in the joint declaration. A tripartite agreement was never reached because the ministries — particularly the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) — were concerned about references to “release of variants [of human DNA sequence]”, in a draft of the declaration, according to a source close to the Japanese government.

Japan is currently carrying out its own initiative to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Japanese population, as well as a full-length complementary DNA (cDNA) project aimed at sequencing 30,000 cDNA clones. Both SNPs and cDNA are considered as variants of human DNA sequence.