WIN MCNAMEE/REUTERS Dr. Craig Venter (L) shakes hands with Dr. Francis Collins (R) following a new conference announcing the public release of the map of the human genetic code

The Pioneers of Molecular Biology: Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter
	The men who mapped the human genome are brilliant scientists—and bitter rivals
	By Frederic Golden

Posted Sunday, February 9, 2002; 10:31 a.m. EST
They're both strapping guys, well over 6 ft. tall. One likes to roar across the countryside on his motorcycle, the other gets no greater pleasure than driving his yacht through an ocean storm. More important, both are passionate scientists, equally dedicated to the conquest of disease. But for all their similarities, Francis Collins, 52, and J. Craig Venter, 56, have been archrivals in molecular biology's most ferocious competition since the race discover DNA's structure half a century ago: the monumental effort to decode the human genome.

Collins, a physician, geneticist and born-again Christian, is a small-town Virginia farm boy who went on to become leader of a University of Toronto team that successively identified the genes for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis and, in collaboration with others, Huntington disease. Convinced that progress against human illness depends on greater understanding of the genes, he welcomed the opportunity to lead the government's multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project when, in 1993, he was named to succeed James Watson as director of the National Center for Humane Genome Research.

Watson had angrily resigned in part because of Venter's entry into the genome race. An obscure geneticist with NIH's neurological institute, the onetime California surfer, college dropout and Vietnam medic had developed a novel technique for "reading" DNA sequences by extracting single-stranded RNA from living cells and using it to clone DNA that was a mirror image of the genes he was after—only without the clutter of "junk" DNA that he would have encountered in the original cells. His NIH bosses were so elated at the rate Venter was sequencing genes that they rushed out to patent them. That incensed Watson, who predicted paralyzing legal battles. Like Watson, Venter also quit his NIH job. With his geneticist wife, Claire Fraser, he set up The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). 

Until then Venter had been going after the genome of target organisms like microbes in only bits and pieces. But inspired by one of TIGR's first hires, the Nobelist Hamilton Smith, he began "shotgunning" the entire genome, using a blender to break it into millions of pieces—each of them one of DNA's bases, A, T, C and G. Coated with base-specific dyes, these different bases could then be picked out by laser beams and reassembled into their original sequence by high-speed computers. The approach was so dazzling that in 1998 Venter formed his own for-profit company, Celera (from the Latin for "quick") Genomics and boldly announced that he would sequence the entire human genome by 2001, at least four years ahead of the government's target date and at only a fraction of the estimated $3 billion cost.

The moves prompted a new round of bickering. Watson told Congress that Venter's machines "could be run by monkeys," while Collins and his colleagues feared that Venter would try to turn the genetic information into his private preserve, a charge he denied. Still, the threat of being beaten by an interloper had a positive effect: it jolted the Human Genome Project, until then a hodgepodge of independent labs in the U.S. under joint NIH-Department of Energy aegis, plus additional facilities in Britain, into a badly needed reorganization and brought an infusion of new funding. The upshot: the bitter race between the rival groups was declared ended in a virtual dead heat. On June 26, 2000, at Bill Clinton's insistence, Venter and Collins gritted their teeth and announced their results jointly at a White House ceremony: a first rough draft of the human genome, the letters for some 35,000 genes in all. 

Both men were pleased—up to a point. Collins, who lamented that all the quarreling had created "a false public impression that scientists are hard driving, greedy and competitive rather than engaged in a noble exploration," is delighted that the data is now firmly established in the public domain. Venter, while also happy that the personal attacks have ended, feels the White House-brokered truce obscured his team's true achievement, which was to nail down the genome at only a fraction of the cost of the public effort and with far more detail and accuracy. Certainly, he has reason to feel somewhat wounded. Since that big day, he has seen Celera's stock plummet to virtually nothing ("At its peak, I was biotech's first billionaire," he chuckles ruefully), has been forced out as CEO and is now the head of four strictly nonprofit research organizations that hope to use genomics to solve various societal problems.  

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