Word: venter
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Apparently, this is the moment for widespread panic. Wielding their groundbreaking discovery, Craig Venter and Francis Collins also seem to have stumbled upon a few of our species' darkest fears: We stand on the verge of grasping every human being's genetic information. But who gets to see it? And, perhaps more importantly, who doesn...
...Venter not only beat the federal genome project's original deadline by a half-decade but also goosed his rivals to go faster. By the beginning of summer, Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the government's effort, will present its "working draft" of the genome...
...competition hasn't exactly been friendly. Collins has vilified Venter as untrustworthy and unscrupulous and said he would make the book of life "read like Mad magazine." Venter, for his part, has portrayed the official genome project as a bumbling bureaucracy. Personalities aside, the two efforts are based on very different techniques. The government scientists broke their DNA samples into segments of about 150 million letters long (the overall genome has some 3.4 billion letters). These were subdivided into segments of about 6,000 letters each, to be read by sequencing machines. In the final step, the pieces were reassembled...
...Venter, by contrast, took a more radical approach, smashing the DNA into millions of pieces, then feeding each into new high-speed robotic sequencers. By March 27, Celera had all of them read, though they will not be reassembled for three to six weeks. And lots more work remains to be done after that. Figuring out where those letters fall in our 100,000 or so genes, and precisely what each of these genes does, could take an additional 50 years...
Both Celera and the Human Genome Project will go after new genomes--among them that of the mouse. (Tellingly, the government researchers are expected to adopt Venter's technique for this task.) Reason: not only are mice useful to test potential treatments, but also--because they share many of our genes--they offer an alternative route to understanding how genes work and how they can cause disease...