The Race Is Over

The great genome quest is officially a tie, thanks to a round of pizza diplomacy. Yet lead researcher Craig Venter still draws few cheers from his colleagues

One day last April, Aristides (Ari) Patrinos, a scientist at the Department of Energy who directs that agency's share of the Human Genome Project, got a call from Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute and the project's unofficial head. "Let's try it," said Collins--and at those words Patrinos knew that a longstanding scientific feud finally had a chance of being resolved. For months, Collins had been under pressure to hammer out his differences with J. Craig Venter, the prickly CEO of Celera Genomics, which was running its own independent genome-sequencing project--differences over who...

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