Word: venter
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...contrast, when scientists from Craig Venter's Celera Genomics and the Human Genome Project announce that they're finished sequencing the genome--which they are scheduled to do this week--the milestone will be a lot murkier. That's because they're not really finished. What the scientists at Celera have done is sequence about 97% of the genome, and the remaining 150 million or so letters won't be deciphered anytime soon. The HGP is even further behind; unlike Celera, it hasn't put its strings of letters into proper order yet. This loose end should be cleared...
Almost everyone agrees that the complete genome sequence is essential to functional genomics--everyone, that is, except William Haseltine, CEO of Human Genome Sciences, a firm he started with Craig Venter in 1992. "Human genome sequencing [of the entire genome] helps us understand the deep and interesting questions of how our genome relates to those of other species," says Haseltine dismissively. "But it isn't particularly practical...
...Human Genome Research Institute and the project's unofficial head. "Let's try it," said Collins--and at those words Patrinos knew that a longstanding scientific feud finally had a chance of being resolved. For months, Collins had been under pressure to hammer out his differences with J. Craig Venter, the prickly CEO of Celera Genomics, which was running its own independent genome-sequencing project--differences over who should get the credit for this scientific milestone; over whose genome sequence was more complete, more accurate, more useful; over the free exchange of what may be mankind's most important data...
...bickering had become downright nasty at times, upstaging the enormous importance of the 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...
According to a CNN/TIME poll taken a week before Venter and Collins made their historic announcement, nearly two thirds of Americans wanted to dive into their own genetic material headfirst; 61 percent reported they would want to know if they were predisposed to contracting any particular diseases. But only 22 percent wanted their health insurers to get a peek, and a mere 14 percent were interested in letting Uncle Sam in on the data...