Word: nih
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...project and threatening to slow the pace of scientific discovery. Therefore Patrinos had been lobbying his colleague to make love, not war, despite Venter's uncanny ability to get under the skin of Collins and other leaders of the U.S.-British genome project. So had Collins' counterparts at other NIH institutes. And so, most important, had President Clinton, who at one point scribbled a note to science adviser Neal Lane with the terse instruction: "Fix it...make these guys work together...
...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...
Back in the U.S., he blazed through college and graduate school at the University of California at San Diego in six years. After a stint at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he was recruited by NIH's neurological institute, where he worked on locating and decoding a gene for an adrenaline-receptor protein in brain cells, but found progress exasperatingly slow. So when he learned in 1986 about a machine that could "read" genes by shining lasers on their dyed letters (A, T, C and G, the four nitrogenous bases--adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine--that spell...
...June 1991 he had increased the number of identified genes by 347, up from 2,000. His bosses at NIH were so pleased that they rushed to patent them, only to set off a firestorm. Watson, then head of NIH's part of the Human Genome Project (another part is under the Department of Energy), denounced the move as "sheer lunacy" that would cause paralyzing legal battles. When the dust settled, NIH had withdrawn its patent proposal, Watson had quit the genome project, and Venter and Fraser, a former graduate student at Buffalo whom he had married after splitting with...
...larger, known segments, delaying the sequencing to learn more about the genes first. As an added fillip, Venter cross-checked his results by sequencing the genes in both directions, achieving a level of accuracy that so impressed his initially skeptical rivals that British sequencers, along with labs funded by NIH and DOE, later announced they too would adopt this strategy...