CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By FREDERIC GOLDEN and MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

One day last April, Aristides (Ari) Patrinos, a scientist at the Department of Energy who directs that agency’s share of the Human Genome Project, got a call from Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute and the project’s unofficial head. “Let’s try it,” said Collins—and at those words Patrinos knew that a longstanding scientific feud finally had a chance of being resolved. For months, Collins had been under pressure to hammer out his differences with J. Craig Venter, the prickly CEO of Celera Genomics, which was running its own independent genome-sequencing project—differences over who should get the credit for this scientific milestone; over whose genome sequence was more complete, more accurate, more useful; over the free exchange of what may be mankind’s most important data versus the exploitation of what may also be its most valuable.

The bickering had become downright nasty at times, upstaging the vast importance of the project and threatening to slow the pace of scientific discovery. Therefore Patrinos had been lobbying his colleague to make love, not war, despite Venter’s uncanny ability to get under the skin of Collins and other leaders of the U.S.-British genome project. So had Collins’ counterparts at other NIH institutes. And so, most important, had President Clinton, who at one point scribbled a note to science adviser Neal Lane with the terse instruction: “Fix it ... make these guys work together.”

Venter was clearly ready. His tactless rhetoric had lost him respect among his colleagues, and he recognized that more controversy could overshadow a historic moment in biomedicine. Beyond that, he’d taken a beating in the marketplace. After a joint declaration by Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in March that all genomic information should be free, the value of Celera stock plummeted from $189 a share to $149.25.

So on May 7, over pizza and beer at Patrinos’ Rockville, Md., town house, the two wary antagonists sat down in a deliberately casual setting to work out their differences.

And finally they came, if not to a meeting of the minds, at least to a workable understanding—and a framework for this week’s joint announcement. After more than a decade of dreaming, planning and heroic number crunching, both groups have deciphered essentially all the 3.1 billion biochemical “letters” of human DNA, the coded instructions for building and operating a fully functional human.

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this achievement. Armed with the genetic code, scientists can now start teasing out the secrets of human health and disease at the molecular level—secrets that will lead to a revolution in diagnosing and treating everything from Alzheimer’s to heart disease to cancer, and more. In a matter of decades, the world of medicine will be utterly transformed, and history books will mark this week as the ceremonial start of the genomic era.

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.

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.

Time, July 3, 2000

Questions
1. What led to the feud between Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter? How was this feud resolved?
2. What is the significance of mapping the human genome?

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