Russia's special path

The Soviet Human Genome program started almost simultaneously with a similar international one - in 1988. Its initiator, academician Alexander Baev, managed to captivate Mikhail Gorbachev with his idea, and over two years more than $20 million was allocated for the program. This made it possible to purchase the most modern equipment at that time (on which domestic scientists are still working), reagents (the reserves made at that time ran out only in the mid-90s) and, most importantly, to attract talented youth.

Even before the final collapse of the USSR - in 1991 - funding for the program was sharply reduced. Now it is about 250 thousand dollars a year, which roughly corresponds to the budget of a team of three to four people engaged in genome research in developed countries (for comparison, each of the teams working on the complete deciphering of the human genome consisted of hundreds of specialists). According to the Chairman of the Scientific Council on the Human Genome Problem, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Lev Kiselev (who headed this program after the death of Academician Baev in 1994), it was the frivolity of funding that did not allow Russia to directly participate in the work on deciphering the human genome within the framework of an international scientific consortium. Russia had to rebuild on the fly and, in fact, limit itself to those tasks that can be solved with extremely meager material and technical capabilities.

Problems were found. “Deciphering genomes turned molecular biology from a science with a constant lack of evidence into a science suffering from an excess of evidence,” says Lev Kiselev. “There was a need to somehow comprehend this mountain of billions of nucleotides. Thus a new science was born - bioinformatics.”

The need for invention is cunning - talented and qualified Russian biologists and programmers, who did not have such powerful computers as their Western colleagues, were earlier than others in creating methods and algorithms that make it easier to work with huge amounts of data. It is not surprising that Russian science has found itself at the forefront of bioinformatics. The schools of Andrei Mironov and Vladimir Gelfand (State Research Institute of Genetics and Selection of Industrial Microorganisms), Nikolai Volchanov (Novosibirsk Institute of Cytology and Genetics) enjoy great authority in the molecular biological world. Vladimir Tumanyan's group (Institute of Molecular Biology) has created one of the best programs for rapid recognition of genes in nucleotide text.

Another promising area of ​​genomic research in Russia, according to Lev Kiselev, is ethnogenomics, which makes it possible to trace the biological connections of various ethnic groups (identified on the basis of cultural and linguistic commonality). Professor Bykovsky from the Institute of General Genetics, together with other groups of scientists, found that at least “through the female line” (the study was carried out on the DNA of mitochondria - intracellular formations received by a person only from the mother) Russians are very close to other Europeans and are very different from the Turkic peoples and Mongols.

Palaeogenomics, which deals with the study of DNA from ancient human remains found in burial grounds and mounds, is also adjacent to this range of problems. Russian scientists were co-authors of studies of Neanderthal genomes, the results of which forced a new look at the evolution of this species and its genetic connections with modern humans.

However, being worthy (at least more worthy than resources allow) represented in fundamental academic works, Russia has every chance of being left out of the commercial benefits expected from genomic research in the coming years. Thus, according to Lev Kiselev, in the next 10 years, based on the study of the human genome, about 500 fundamentally new types of drugs will be created - the same number as has been accumulated by pharmacology from ancient times to the present day. New drugs will be “addressed” directly to those genes whose work is associated with certain disorders. Such a drug will turn on, turn off, speed up or slow down the work of only a specific gene (which will require a huge variety of “genomic” drugs), and in the long term, “edit” its text. Huge economic prospects are promised by the use of genomics methods in agriculture (even before the completion of the Human Genome project, the genome of rice, one of the most important food crops, was completely deciphered), microbiological industry, etc. But all this will most likely come to Russia only in the form of finished goods - medicines and food products.