The Great Quest to Map the Human Genome Is Officially a Tie, Thanks to a Round of Pizza Diplomacy

S C I E N C E The Race Is Over The great quest to map the human genome is officially a tie, thanks to a round of pizza diplomacy. Yet lead researcher Craig Venter still draws few cheers from his colleagues By FREDERIC GOLDEN and MICHAEL D. LEMONICK The bickering had become downright nasty at times, upstaging the vast importance of the proj e c t ne day last april, aristides (ari) patr i - and threatening to slow the pace of scientific nos, a scientist at the Department of di s c o v e r y . Theref o r e Patrinos had been lobbying his En e r gy who directs that agency’s share of colleague to make love, not war, despite Ven t e r ’s the Human Genome Project, got a call un c a n n y ability to get under the skin of Collins f rom Francis Collins, director of the and other leaders of the U.S . -British genome NationalO Institutes of Hea l t h ’s National Hum a n pr oject. So had Collins’ counterparts at other ni h Genome Research Institute and the pro j e c t’s institutes. And so, most important, had Pres i d e n t unofficial head. “Let ’s try it,” said Collins—and at Clinton, who at one point scribbled a note to those words Patrinos knew that a longstanding science adviser Neal Lane with the terse instruc- scientific feud finally had a chance of being tion: “Fix it .. make these guys work together.” re s o lved. For months, Collins had been under Venter was clearly rea d y. His tactless rhetoric had pre s s u r e to hammer out his differences with J. lost him respect among his colleagues, and he rec - Cr aig Ven t e r , the prickly ce o of Celera Genomics, ognized that more controversy could overshadow which was running its own independent genome- a historic moment in biomedicine. Beyond that, sequencing proj e c t —di f f e r ences over who should he ’d taken a beating in the marketplace. After a get the credit for this scientific milestone; over joint declaration by Clinton and British Prime whose genome sequence was more complete, more Minister To ny Blair in Ma rch that all genomic ac c u r ate, more useful; over the free exchange of information should be free, the value of Celera what may be mankind’s most important data stock plummeted from $189 a share to $149.2 5 . versus the exploitation of what may also be its So on May 7, over pizza and beer at Pat r i n o s ’ most val u a b l e . Rockville, Md., town house, the two wary antag- 14 time, july 3, 2000 S C I E N C E onists sat down in a deliberat e l y casual setting to to put this together,” Collins told Tim e . work out their differences. Ce l e r a, by contrast, has not only the pages but And finally they came, if not to a meeting of all the words and letters as well—though neither the minds, at least to a workable understanding— side can yet say what most of these words and let- and a framework for this week’s joint announce- ters mean. And while the hgp boasts that it has ment. After more than a decade of dreaming, plan- done its sequence nearly seven times over to ning and heroic number crunching, both grou p s gu a r antee accurac y , Celera has gone over its own have deciphered essentially all the 3.1 billion almost five times. Moreover, the company came biochemical “letters” of human dn a, the coded up with a new technique that made its sequenc- instructions for building and operating a fully func- ing rate, alrea d y the fastest around, even faster. In tional human. addition, Venter claims that by the end of the It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this y e a r, he’ll have sequenced the genome of the achievement. Armed with the genetic code, mo u s e —whose 2.3 billion letters contain enough scientists can now start teasing out the secrets of similarities to ours to make it vitally important to human health and disease at the molecular level— scientists tracking down human gene function. se c r ets that will lead to a revolution in diagnosing What’s next? To get a fuller racial and gender and treating everything from Alzheimer’s to heart mix, Venter will go through at least six more disease to cancer, and more. In a matter of decades, human genomes, pro b a b ly including his own the world of medicine will be utterly tran s f o r m e d , (“ W h y not, if that’s the business I’m in?” he asks, and history books will mark this week as the cere- admitting nothing). After the mouse, he’ll prob a - monial start of the genomic era. bl y go on to the chimp, among our closest primate But while the announcement has been exquis- kin, and explore plant genes, including rice and i t e ly chore o g raphed to make the two scientists corn. He is also taking Celera into the emerging look like equals, it’s clear to insiders that Ven t e r ’s field of pro t e o m i c s —understanding how genes pr oject is a lot further along. hg p scientists may make and manage proteins, the actual building have decoded 97% of the genome’s letters—th e blocks of life. ¹ remaining 3% are genera l ly considered unsequenceable and irrel e va n t —but they know Qu e s t i o n s the order of only 53% of them. It’s as if they’v e 1. What led to the feud between Francis Collins got the pages in the so-called book of life in the and J. Craig Venter? How was this feud res o lv e d ? pr oper order but with the letters on each page 2. What is the significance of mapping the human sc r ambled. “It’s going to take us a couple of years genome? time, july 3, 2000 15.

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