The Public-Private Ruckus Over the Human Genome

A private firm says it has beaten the feds in attempts to crack the human genetic code. Overall, we're all winners.

By Michael Eskenazi Thursday, Apr. 06, 2000
    • Score one for private enterprise. Two years ago, Craig Venter drew a rousing chorus of harrumphs (and a few "yeah, rights") from government scientists when he said that his genetics research firm, Celera Genomics, could map the human genome three times faster than the feds and at a fraction of the cost. The Human Genome Project, after all, is one of the most closely watched federal science projects of recent memory. In the abstract it stands to become one of the great scientific breakthroughs by promising to crack nature's code for what makes us who we are — and, presumably, to make it possible to right what goes wrong. So Venter took great pleasure on Thursday in announcing to a congressional subcommittee that his team cracked it first — that the Celera crew has already found all the bits and pieces that make up the genome sequence. All they have left to do, they say, is fit them together in the right order to form the long-anticipated genome map.

    "There's been this sense that there's a race between the public project and the private project," says TIME science writer Dick Thompson. "That implies that there's a finish line, and there really isn't. There are just a series of milestones and Celera has just reached an important one first." Last week the government-backed scientists announced that they'd reached a milestone by completing two thirds of the sequence and predicted that they'd have the entire sequence completed by late June. Venter now says that his firm will have its entire map completed by the end of May. "If Celera completes its map when it says it will, it will have taken a very important step," says Thompson. "The first thing it will tell is exactly how many genes there are in the genome. We know it's between 80,000 and 120,000, but we don't know the exact amount. Then we'll start to ask what the various genes mean and do."

    There's a lot a stake apart from pride. Celera and its investors are looking to make a mint from the project(and were rewarded Thursday with a 25 percent jump in the company's stock price); the public scientists, meanwhile, are anxious to preserve their funding. And that might explain in part why the members of the Human Genome Project, which is funded by National Institutes of Health, are warning that exuberance over the most recent announcement may be misplaced. The federal scientists have long taken issue with Celera's techniques, saying that the public project is taking a more thorough approach to the mapping. "There are gaps in Celera's gene sequence," says Thompson. "But what the public project doesn't like to say is that there are big gaps in their sequences as well. Right now we simply don't have the technology to clone some chromosomes." And as for the medical breakthroughs that these projects promise, they are still a few years away. First, it's going to take everyone some time to sort through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and overcome concerns about sharing information. Then any resultant technologies will have to be put through the usual testing. For now, though, Venter and his colleagues can savor the moment.