(5 of 5)
Meanwhile, the threat of being upstaged by Venter has put enormous pressure on the Human Genome Project. During a previously scheduled project review last summer, the directors did a thorough re-evaluation of their procedures, soliciting advice from the scientists doing the actual mapping. In the end, the message was clear. Says Collins: "We heard from the users that our current degree of accuracy wasn't needed for many of their strategies."
So the Human Genome Project was recast. Completion was pushed up from 2005 to 2003. And while project scientists had previously been unwilling to release data until they were of high quality, the administrators announced that they would offer up a "working draft" of only moderate precision by 2001. Says Mark Guyer, an assistant director with the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute: "These data are so rich, it's hard not to extract value from them." But, he admits, "it would not have happened had it not been for the Celera announcement."
Venter wasn't finished, though. Last month it was revealed that the U.S. Department of Energy, whose labs are part of the federal project, was negotiating with Venter to let him do part of the job for it. The cost to the government: zero. That proposal was put on ice by project leaders, supposedly because the DOE had contracted with Venter without checking with other project members, and also out of fear that the release of information to the public might be delayed. Unofficially, it's clear that sour grapes over Venter's latest triumph played a role in their decision.
Whether it's Venter or the government or some sort of public-private partnership that eventually finishes the job, all the genome mappers agree that once the gene sequence is complete, the next step will be to look into how genes vary from one person to the next. In most diseases, it is probably a conspiracy of several genes and environmental factors that result in illness or death. Through its human-variation project, the NIH hopes to identify genes and sets of genes that only nudge people toward a particular disease.
"This will be our most powerful tool," says Collins. "Finding these weak-susceptibility genes will be moderately useful for predicting risk, but they will be far more useful in allowing us to see the real molecular basis of diseases--all diseases--whether it's multiple sclerosis or brain tumors or diabetes." The truth is that no one can predict exactly what breakthroughs might result from the deciphering of the human genome. As Venter puts it: "It's like it was before electricity. No one could have envisioned personal computers back then."
And for that reason, it's probably just as well that both efforts, public and private, are proceeding in parallel. "The public sector is learning how to produce very high-quality data," says Maynard Olson, director of the University of Washington Genome Center, which is part of the federal project. "You'll never see private companies doing that." If private companies focus first on the most intriguing genes, while government-sponsored scientists sequence the rest, everybody will profit in the end.
--With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Andrea Dorfman/New York and Kate Noble/Cambridge