The Race Is Over

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But while the announcement has been exquisitely choreographed to make the two scientists look like equals, it's clear to insiders that Venter's project is a lot further along. HGP scientists may have decoded 97% of the genome's letters--the remaining 3% are generally considered unsequenceable and irrelevant--but they know the order of only 53% of them. It's as if they've got the pages in the so-called book of life in the proper order but with the letters on each page scrambled. "It's going to take us a couple of years to put this together," Collins told TIME.

Celera, by contrast, has not only the pages but all the words and letters as well--though neither side can yet say what most of these words and letters mean. And while the HGP boasts that it has done its sequence nearly seven times over to guarantee accuracy, Celera has gone over its own almost five times. Moreover, the company came up with a new technique that made its sequencing rate, already the fastest around, even faster. In addition, Venter claims that by the end of the year, he'll have sequenced the genome of the mouse--whose 2.3 billion letters contain enough similarities to ours to make it vitally important to scientists tracking down human gene function.

Given this remarkable record, why are so few of Venter's fellow scientists trumpeting his success? Or talking him up for a Nobel Prize? Why, in fact, is this cherubic-looking, blue-eyed ex-surfer hated by so many colleagues, who have called him everything from a greedy megalomaniac to a Hitler? Forget about easy explanations, such as his outsize ego (yes, one of the samples he is analyzing is rumored to contain his own DNA) or his penchant for doing science by press release (yes, he keeps his door open to reporters) or his tendency to do not science but, as pioneer DNA mapper James Watson sneered, tedious assembly-line labor on machines that "could be run by monkeys" (yes, most of Celera's analysis was done by robot gene sequencers and high-speed computers).

The real answer is that Venter thumbs his nose at the system and the scientific establishment. He scorns the feigned modesty that most scientists wear as comfortably as their lab coats and tweed jackets. He loves to buck authority (in the Navy in Vietnam he was tossed in the brig twice for refusing to obey orders), and he almost always speaks his mind. "He has no filter. He shoots from the hip," says Norton Zinder of Rockefeller University, leader of the effort to map the genome who overcame his initial hostility and joined Celera's advisory board.