The Race Is Over

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Having signed up five major pharmaceutical houses as well as Vanderbilt University, Venter says Celera has jumped ahead of all its rivals, with revenue doubling every year. Celera's stock has gyrated wildly from $15 a share to more than $320 and down to $50 in the space of a year, so Wall Street obviously can't make up its mind about the company. But, says Venter, "our business model is working terrifically." He expects profitability in another couple of years.

What's next? To get a fuller racial and gender mix, Venter will go through at least six more human genomes, probably including his own ("Why not, if that's the business I'm in?" he asks, admitting nothing). After the mouse, he'll probably go on to the chimp, among our closest primate kin, and explore plant genes, including rice and corn. He is also taking Celera into the emerging field of proteomics--understanding how genes make and manage proteins, the actual building blocks of life.

Given the dramatic differences in their personalities, Venter and Collins will never be close collaborators. The agreement that led up to this week's announcement has more the character of a statesmanlike cease-fire than of a scientific merger. The two teams will try to publish their work simultaneously--but not jointly--in an upcoming issue of a major journal, probably Science. They have agreed that patents are appropriate only at the point where a gene's function is understood.

Most of all, they'll try to avoid publicly criticizing each other. "All of us in this room," Venter told TIME last Thursday, "have found a way to put the human emotions behind us. There are things we have all said that, given a rational condition, we wish we hadn't said." Said Collins simply: "I heartily agree." With any luck, their bitter dispute, which has loomed so large for so long, will be a minor footnote in the genomic revolution that has barely begun.

--Reported by Dick Thompson/Washington