The Science Council of Japan has complained to the U.S. journal Science about its decision to print a U.S. biotech company's thesis about the human genome, saying the company has not shared its data with international researchers.
Nobuhiro Go, professor of chemistry at Kyoto University and a member of the council, said Science's plan to print the thesis by PE Corp.'s Celera Genomics Group in its upcoming issue "would discourage genetic and biological experts from integrating the human genome database."
The governmental council has sent a letter asking the magazine's editors to reconsider publishing the thesis, Go said.
Science's editor in chief, Donald Kennedy, however, defended the policy.
"To insist on GenBank deposition would have consigned the Celera sequence data to trade secret status. . . . We strongly feel that this would have meant a greater prohibition on scientific progress."
Celera has reportedly not registered its original sequence data on the human genome with the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration organized by experts in Europe, Japan and the United States.
The collaboration consists of Japan's DNA Data Bank under the National Institute of Genetics, the Britain-based European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database and GenBank of the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the U.S.
Some world leading scientific groups are questioning Science's plan, Go said.