Word: celera
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...would read like Cliffs Notes or Mad magazine. Others call him a cheat for lifting data made public on the government's GenBank website www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov at taxpayers' expense--and then patenting sequences culled from this data, thereby locking up information originally intended to be freely available. (Ironically, Celera suffered a setback when some of the government data turned out to be contaminated with nonhuman sequences...
...face of such attacks, Venter remains serenely optimistic. "Imagine the infinitesimally small odds of ending up in such a privileged position," he tells a visitor to his airy, press-clipping-decorated office at Celera's Rockville, Md., headquarters, just a Metro ride away from his NIH rivals, "of making these discoveries and trying to help guide and impact medicine." Sure, he admits, the criticism "gets painful at times," but, he adds, "I wouldn't trade what I'm doing for anything...
Despite some accounts likening his accomplishment to finding biology's Holy Grail, Venter points out that identifying the order of the letters in our genetic alphabet is just a first step. Still ahead for Celera as well as its competitors: the much more complicated task of telling what those letters mean, what they do and what can be done if the messages they spell out are in error--a prime cause of human disease and suffering (see following story...
...when Hunkapiller showed Venter his new ABI Prism 3700, a sequencer five times as fast and even more highly automated, Venter formed a partnership with Hunkapiller's company, Applied Biosystems (now PE Biosystems). Venter named his new outfit Celera, from the Latin for "quick." It was. Backed with an infusion of $300 million from his new collaborator, Venter boldly announced that he would sequence and assemble the entire human genome by the year...
...question is whether, with the publicly funded project's data online, there will be a market for Celera's products. Venter says yes. He'll be offering sophisticated, contamination-free, gilt-edged data, he explains, that include the comparative genomes of other species and the genetics of specific diseases, plus special proprietary software to analyze this genetic mother lode...