Conflict of interest

A dispute has flared up between two teams racing to sequence the human
genome. The international, publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP) and the
company Celera Genomics of Maryland began discussing ways of uniting their
efforts last year. Now the talks have broken down because Celera wants to keep
genome information secret from commercial rivals, while the HGP insists on
releasing data immediately. “It would have been great to combine our data, but
now the [HGP] will have to continue on its own,” says John Sulston of Britain’s
Sanger Centre.