Word: tigre
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Freed from the confines of the NIH, Venter took an offer from a venture capitalist to head his own research facility, which he named The Institute for Genomic Research--TIGR, or "tiger." The private sector gave him the resources to find genes as fast as he could...
Today, four years later, a total of 20 genomes have been fully decoded, 10 of them at TIGR. In December scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and at the Sanger Centre passed a new milestone by decoding the first animal genome, that of a tiny roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans. At 97 million letters, C. elegans' genome is by far the most sophisticated ever sequenced. But if Venter's newly formed Celera (derived from the word celerity, which means swiftness) can pull it off, his proposal to shotgun the entire 3 billion-letter human genome in three years will make...
Venter flourished in the private sector. Backed by venture capitalist Wallace Steinberg, he founded the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and within a year had been transformed from a government scientist with a $2,000 savings account to a millionaire. He gave gifts of stock to his family and Fraser's, and bought the Sorcerer. Meanwhile, he continued to pour money into genomics, completing gene maps of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium in 1995, followed by those of H. pylori, which causes ulcers, and the syphilis microbe...
Even though TIGR was spewing out gene sequences at unprecedented rates, Venter was still restless. Then Hunkapiller called from his office at Perkin-Elmer to say that he had a new, faster machine he wanted Venter to see. What Venter saw was the future: a gene-mapping computer 50 times as fast as anything running at TIGR. With one of these machines, the 1,000 scientists who had spent 10 years decoding a yeast genome could have completed their work in one day. Emboldened by the new technology, Venter announced his plans to sequence the human genome rapidly. He founded...
Venter exudes confidence and points to TIGR's track record. Using the shotgun approach, his company has already sequenced the DNA of seven microorganisms, including the bacterium that causes ulcers. That number, he notes, represents half of all the genomes decoded to date. "The [human] genome will be accurately and completely covered," Venter promised the science subcommittee last week. And as proof he promised to sequence the genome of the fruit fly (which is far more complex than those of bacteria) within a year...