For two years public and private scientists have been racing at a blistering pace to decode our full genetic blueprint, or genome. At times, biotech firms, spurred by dreams of giga-bucks, appeared to be in the lead. But like an Aesopian tortoise, the government scientists working with the Human Genome Project have continued pushing along. In November they announced that they had completed mapping the first billion "letters"--or basic chemical units--in our DNA's alphabet.
Last week at Bio2000, a gathering of more than 10,000 scientists, biotech entrepreneurs and patent attorneys in Boston, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research...
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