When the Human Genome Project was launched a little under a decade ago, boosters compared it with the Manhattan Project or the mission to put men on the moon: an effort so complex and so broad in scope that only the government had the financial and bureaucratic resources to pull it off--yet with such huge potential payoffs that virtually no resources should be spared.
By the time the project was complete, promised its advocates, science would at last have access to the "book of life"--the precise biochemical code for each of the 100,000 or so genes that largely determine every physical characteristic in the human body. Once researchers knew that, they'd be able to figure out exactly how each gene functions--and, more important, malfunctions to trigger deadly illnesses from heart disease to cancer.
Important as it was, the job would take some time. Unlike the atom bomb or the space race, there was no Hitler or Khrushchev who threatened to get there first. Without such external dangers forcing them to pull out all the stops, federally funded genome-project scientists figured they could move at their own pace; they would finish up in 2005 or thereabouts.
They figured wrong. The Nazis and the communists may be history, but an even more electrifying force has arisen to put the fear of God into the genome project: the profit motive. Pharmaceutical companies stand to make incalculable billions of dollars by turning genome research into new treatments for a dizzying array of diseases. And the companies that manage to get the information first--and lock up what they find with patents--will profit most (see box).
It's no surprise, therefore, that private firms have plunged into human-genome projects of their own. Nor is it surprising, given the potential payoff, that their scientists have found ways to speed up the decoding process. Indeed, one such company--Celera Genomics Corp., led by maverick scientist Craig Venter (see following story)--declared last spring that it would have the job substantially wrapped up in three years.
Blindsided by Venter's surprise announcement, leaders of the federal genome project--which is being carried out at university and government labs in the U.S., at the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, England, and at facilities in Germany and Japan--spent the summer rethinking their schedule. The result: an announcement last fall that they would finish up by 2003 rather than 2005, with a rough "working draft" of the genome to be published by 2001.
The measured march to decode the human genome, in short, has turned into a headlong horse race--and the rivalry isn't always polite. The federal genome project, critics carp privately, has been shockingly mismanaged and is sorely lacking in vision. Private efforts, counter some in the public project, are pirate operations that seek to lock critical segments of God's genomic handiwork behind a barricade of patents. Beyond that, they say, speeding up the pace of discovery could lead to slapdash, incomplete results. "If this is the book of life," sniffs Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, in Bethesda, Md., and one of the leaders of the federal Human Genome Project, "we should not be satisfied with a lot of mistakes or holes."