Genome jumpers

Every scientist’s nightmare is betting everything on an experiment that will take unheard-of investment and well over a decade to complete — only to have a Johnny-come-lately stride in midway through the work and declare that he’s going to beat you to the finish by years. The ‘J.’ in J. Craig Venter may not stand for ‘Johnny’, but the rest of the bad dream is happening to Francis Collins and the Human Genome Project, if you believe the news reports. “A pioneer in genetic sequencing and a private company are joining forces with the aim of deciphering the entire DNA, or genome, of humans within three years, faster and cheaper than the federal government is planning,” Nicholas Wade wrote in the 10 May edition of the New York Times. And indeed, the report suggested that Collins and his boss, NIH director Harold Varmus were throwing in the towel. “Both Dr Varmus and Dr Collins expressed confidence that they could persuade Congress to accept the need for [refocusing the $3 billion NIH effort]... noting that the sequencing of mouse and other genomes has always been included as a necessary part of the human genome project.” In fact, Collins and Varmus were not about to give up on the project, even though Venter’s plan does indeed present a formidable challenge. On 15 September, Collins announced that he is planning to match Venter’s 2001 deadline for a rough map — and keep going from there, to make a more accurate and complete map by 2003. This adventure makes for great story-telling. Here’s a man with a million-dollar yacht and an ego to match — and an impressive intellect, to be sure. In the best American tradition, he’s the little guy taking on the government. And there’s some bile, to boot, such as when Venter calls Collins a “Government bureaucrat whose job is to hand out money to help get the genome done,” in a New York Times Magazine profile of the personality du jour. “[I]t was as if some aerospace executive had vowed in the mid-1960s to overtake NASA and be the first to put humans on the moon,” the Baltimore Sun noted. Time magazine, among others, compared Venter with Bill Gates, saying that he “may someday control information about the human genome — which in effect is the operating system of humans.”