The Race Is Over

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Nor does Venter subscribe to the traditional belief that true scientists must take a vow of poverty. When he left the National Institutes of Health to begin his great gene chase, he turned almost overnight from a hardscrabble government scientist with $2,000 in the bank into a yacht- and sports car-owning multimillionaire who threw Gatsby-like parties (last year's income: $560,000, not counting options on Celera stock that were worth, at last week's closing price of $125.25, nearly $351 million). And by declaring his intention to sequence the entire human genome in only a fraction of the time (three years) and at a much lower cost ($200 million) than government-sponsored scientists had originally said it would take (15 years and $3 billion), he made his colleagues look like fools. (At the photo session last Thursday for TIME's cover, Venter needled Collins about not keeping pace with the Celera venture. Collins placidly declined to rise to the bait.)

Then there are the complaints about the quality of his work. Collins once said that Venter's map would read like Cliffs Notes or Mad magazine. Others call him a cheat for lifting data made public on the government's GenBank website www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov at taxpayers' expense--and then patenting sequences culled from this data, thereby locking up information originally intended to be freely available. (Ironically, Celera suffered a setback when some of the government data turned out to be contaminated with nonhuman sequences.)

In the face of such attacks, Venter remains serenely optimistic. "Imagine the infinitesimally small odds of ending up in such a privileged position," he tells a visitor to his airy, press-clipping-decorated office at Celera's Rockville, Md., headquarters, just a Metro ride away from his NIH rivals, "of making these discoveries and trying to help guide and impact medicine." Sure, he admits, the criticism "gets painful at times," but, he adds, "I wouldn't trade what I'm doing for anything."

Despite some accounts likening his accomplishment to finding biology's Holy Grail, Venter points out that identifying the order of the letters in our genetic alphabet is just a first step. Still ahead for Celera as well as its competitors: the much more complicated task of telling what those letters mean, what they do and what can be done if the messages they spell out are in error--a prime cause of human disease and suffering (see following story).

Listening to Venter explain all this in his soft California voice, you hear a 53-year-old child of the '60s, not the ogre portrayed by his enemies. He is one of four children of an excommunicated Mormon accountant ("He broke too many rules--coffee, drinking, smoking," says the son, conscious of his father's death at 59) and grew up in the San Francisco suburb of Millbrae. In high school he swam competitively but didn't study. After graduating--barely--he moved down to Newport Beach to surf. But he had smarts. As a draft-eligible nonstudent, he says, he got the highest score of 35,000 recruits on a Navy intelligence test. Trained as a hospital corpsman, he saw North Vietnam's devastating Tet offensive in 1968. Says his wife Claire Fraser, a prominent molecular biologist: "Vietnam changed him. It impressed on him the idea that time is precious, that you have to make every single minute of every single day count."