Word: venter
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...Venter was clearly ready. His tactless rhetoric had lost him respect among his colleagues, and he recognized that more controversy could overshadow a historic moment in biomedicine. Beyond that, he'd taken a beating in the marketplace. After a joint declaration by Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in March that all genomic information should be free, the value of Celera stock plummeted from $189 a share...
...over pizza and beer at Patrinos' Rockville, Md., town house, the two wary antagonists sat down in a deliberately casual setting to work out their differences. In an exclusive conversation with Collins, Venter and TIME correspondent Dick Thompson last Thursday night, Patrinos recalled, "I don't think I've ever seen them as tense as they were that day." Yet despite mistrust on both sides, Collins and Venter met a second time and a third...
...while the announcement has been exquisitely choreographed to make the two scientists look like equals, it's clear to insiders that Venter's project is a lot further along. HGP scientists may have decoded 97% of the genome's letters--the remaining 3% are generally considered unsequenceable and irrelevant--but they know the order of only 53% of them. It's as if they've got the pages in the so-called book of life in the proper order but with the letters on each page scrambled. "It's going to take us a couple of years to put this...
...while the HGP boasts that it has done its sequence nearly seven times over to guarantee accuracy, Celera has gone over its own almost five times. Moreover, the company came up with a new technique that made its sequencing rate, already the fastest around, even faster. In addition, Venter claims that by the end of the year, he'll have sequenced the genome of the mouse--whose 2.3 billion letters contain enough similarities to ours to make it vitally important to scientists tracking down human gene function...
Given this remarkable record, why are so few of Venter's fellow scientists trumpeting his success? Or talking him up for a Nobel Prize? Why, in fact, is this cherubic-looking, blue-eyed ex-surfer hated by so many colleagues, who have called him everything from a greedy megalomaniac to a Hitler? Forget about easy explanations, such as his outsize ego (yes, one of the samples he is analyzing is rumored to contain his own DNA) or his penchant for doing science by press release (yes, he keeps his door open to reporters) or his tendency to do not science...