[Bioperl-l] Celera deal

[Jean-Marc BONNEVILLE]

Dear Mrs Jasny,

I am writing to you as the managing editor in charge of genomics 
paper at Science. I heard Science has agreed to publish the Celera 
sequence data on the human genome without them being deposited in the 
GeneBank database. I am shocked by this deal, and here is why.

I am a bench scientist working in plant biology. We published last 
year the description of some Arabidopsis EMS mutants controlling 
endoreplication. We now have a T-DNA insertion mutant allelic to one 
of these EMS mutants, and the insertion dirupts a gene whose best 
homolog is a human gene. This 3-month old finding was totally 
unexpected, and I learned that from the very first Blast. I would not 
know that by today if the human gene in question had not been 
deposited in
A PUBLIC SEQUENCE DATABASE WITH A SINGLE GATE. My conviction is that 
if money considerations lead to the fact that sequences will have to 
be searched in a daedalus of semi-private Websites, the kind of 
approach I am presently involved in will be considerably slowed down. 
The deal you have with Celera does not deserve science and does not 
honor Science.

I think the non-deposition of sequence data in a public database is a 
strong case for rejection of a scientific paper, and I hope the 
referees will raise this fact with no precedent, and that they can 
stand some pressure...

Let me quote to finish the french writer Francois Rabelais, who wrote 
four centuries ago:
"Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'ame."


Best regards
-- 

Jean-Marc Bonneville

==============================================================================

  Dr Jean-Marc Bonneville
Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Plantes
CNRS/Universite J. Fourier
BP 53
38041 GRENOBLE Cedex 09
FRANCE

tel (+33)4 76 51 48 92
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