Word: celera
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Maybe. At their stepped-up pace, the government scientists should complete their road map of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes by late June. But there are folks out there who could spoil the victory party. Scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter's company, Celera, using a riskier "shotgun" approach to plow through all those letters, is working at a furious pace as well. Only two weeks ago, he announced that Celera had completed mapping the genome of Drosophila melanogaster, a.k.a. the fruit fly, a favorite tool of lab scientists. While the fruit fly genome is far less complex than...
More than vanity is at stake. If Venter's Celera wins what has become an increasingly bitter competition, government scientists fear, the human genome will be entangled in patent and licensing battles as rival drug firms seek protection for agents they are hoping to develop from the newly emerging genetic blueprint. With the announcement last week by Collins' team, though, these concerns are subsiding because Collins has been making the data public as he goes by putting it on the Internet every day. Says Lander: "Now there is no doubt that a genome will be freely available...
Score one for private enterprise. Two years ago, Craig Venter drew a rousing chorus of harrumphs (and a few "yeah, rights") from government scientists when he said that his genetics research firm, Celera Genomics, could map the human genome three times faster than the feds and at a fraction of the cost. The Human Genome Project, after all, is one of the most closely watched federal science projects of recent memory. In the abstract it stands to become one of the great scientific breakthroughs by promising to crack nature's code for what makes us who we are - and, presumably...
...There's been this sense that there's a race between the public project and the private project," says TIME science writer Dick Thompson. "That implies that there's a finish line, and there really isn't. There are just a series of milestones and Celera has just reached an important one first." Last week the government-backed scientists announced that they'd reached a milestone by completing two thirds of the sequence and predicted that they'd have the entire sequence completed by late June. Venter now says that his firm will have its entire map completed...
...There's a lot a stake apart from pride. Celera and its investors are looking to make a mint from the project(and were rewarded Thursday with a 25 percent jump in the company's stock price); the public scientists, meanwhile, are anxious to preserve their funding. And that might explain in part why the members of the Human Genome Project, which is funded by National Institutes of Health, are warning that exuberance over the most recent announcement may be misplaced. The federal scientists have long taken issue with Celera's techniques, saying that the public project is taking...