Whose genome should Roche/454 sequence to make up for selecting Watson’s?

In honor of one of my favorite places on the planet, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I am trying to distract some of the negative attention that has come from James Watson’s latest choice of words. So I am calling on everyone in the community to come up with recommendations for whose genome Roche should sequence with the 454 technology to make up for the fact that they did Watson’s genome. And it would be good if the pick was someone that would make Watson a bit queasy.

Here are my top picks

  • Condoleezza Rice. An absurdly powerful, smart, black woman.
  • Francis Crick. Someone has to have some of his hair somewhere.
  • Rosalind Franklin. Not sure about the hair. But wouldn’t it be great if she was one of the reference genomes.
  • Francis Collins. Apparently no love lost between Francis and Jim.
  • Craig Venter. Sure his genome has been nearly completed. But why not do it again with another method.

Any other suggestions that would stick in Watson’s craw?

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

9 thoughts on “Whose genome should Roche/454 sequence to make up for selecting Watson’s?”

  4. Franklin’s would be fun since one of Watson’s other recent insane ramblings was that she was autistic. Could spite him by sequencing her genome, and definitely/probably/possibly refute that claim as well 😛

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  7. I’d like to see Bill Clinton’s. And Hilary’s. Oh, and has anyone compared yet Watson’s and Venter’s genomes? Is the latter public, too? Probably they both hired a postdoc already to do it 🙂

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