Eric Lander

Unraveling the Threads of Life

When President Bill Clinton hosted an event at the White House four years ago to celebrate the end of the race to decode human DNA, the headlines belonged to the leaders of the two competing teams: J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins. But everyone in the room knew that the unheralded star of the race was the big teddy bear of a man sitting in the fourth row.

It was Eric Lander, while working for Collins in the tortoise-paced Human Genome Project, who saw that his team was losing and made it his business to beat Venter's harelike private venture...

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