The race to sequence the human genome is almost over. Within a few weeks at most, the private company Celera Genomics will be announcing its successful completion of this monumental project, and the publicly funded Human Genome Project won't be far behind.
But the somewhat artificial nature of this much anticipated milestone was underscored in two separate announcements last week. Writing in the journal Nature, a team of scientists working on the public project reported that they had finished decoding chromosome 21, the strand of DNA responsible for, among other things, Down syndrome. And a California company, DoubleTwist, Inc., said it...