“WE WOULDN’T have a genome at all if we hadn’t carried on with the public
effort,” says John Sulston, the former head of the Sanger Centre in
Cambridge.
In 1998, six years after the Human Genome Project began, the effort to
sequence the genome turned into a race when Craig Venter announced that his
company, Celera, would finish it by 2001 using the “whole genome shotgun”
method. That led some people to question whether the public effort was a waste
of taxpayers’ money. Now Celera is claiming victory. “The whole genome assembly
has been an unqualified success,” Eugene Myers of…
