Word: venter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...leaking out last week, shares of stock in Celera Genomics, of Rockville, Md., moved sharply higher. And when the news was announced on Thursday, presidential science adviser Neil Lane hailed it as "a very significant achievement." That was an understatement. Under the leadership of its brash, brilliant president, Craig Venter, Celera had beaten a big-budget, government-funded program in the race to sequence the human genome--to spell out the molecular "letters" that make up the genetic code embedded...
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...
...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 by the end of May. "If Celera completes its map when it says it will, it will have taken a very important step," says Thompson. "The first thing it will tell is exactly how many genes there...
...these projects promise, they are still a few years away. First, it's going to take everyone some time to sort through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and overcome concerns about sharing information. Then any resultant technologies will have to be put through the usual testing. For now, though, Venter and his colleagues can savor the moment...