I was into genetics very early on and was one of the first people to do a genome screens on mice to go gene hunting. They were closing the labs down where I was working and my boss wanted to keep the animal house open and we had our own animal technicians and so suggested I do the study we only had to pay for the food and this allowed me to do the work without a grant.
The reward was my first taste of Euro pharma land. Beta interferon was appearing and the pharma companies were into a big awareness drive. They had charged the great and the good to design and produce MS topic-related booklets
They had decided on one on genetics. I was one of the four groups doing EAE genetics they invited everyone in the world doing MS genetics. It was a meeting you would pay to go to. But this was pharma sponsored. I was offered a business class flight to Boston, a hotel which turned out to be a suite, an honoraria and on the first day they had booked out a restaurant by Paul the redcoats.are coming. Reveres house and the next night the restaurant above the bullfinch pub where they filmed Cheers
You take a resistant strain and cross it with a resistant strain, what I realised was that we never going to have enough mice to get to the precise identity of the gene and that I don’t have enough markers. We found there were a number of regions influencing susceptibility and there were a number of them on one chromosome and this region was picked up by other people. So perhaps we were on to something I started to take the resistant mouse and started to put the gene from the susceptible strain into it…I spent over a year or two crossing mice and selecting mice that had the susceptible strain chromosome. Over time they became more and more like the resistant strain besides this one chromosome. I thought it had three gene regions I showed that the resistant mice without the chromosome were resistant but those with the susceptible chromosome developed disease…so it was time to start hunting but then the people in the animal house killed them all off by mistake and that was the end of my gene hunting days. I realised the technology was not really up to the task and I remember a person saying this at a meeting because at the time the technology wasn’t good enough in humans also. So they looked over again as gene technology superceded the lastest technology…now you can whole genome sequence people
Source: multiple-sclerosis-research.org