Victory for Venter

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

As rumors of success began leaking out last week, shares of stock in Celera Genomics, of Rockville, Md., moved sharply higher. And when the news was announced on Thursday, presidential science adviser Neil Lane hailed it as "a very significant achievement." That was an understatement. Under the leadership of its brash, brilliant president, Craig Venter, Celera had beaten a big-budget, government-funded program in the race to sequence the human genome--to spell out the molecular "letters" that make up the genetic code embedded in our DNA.

That's a major milestone. Once scientists know how each human gene works and how it can malfunction, they can design sensitive diagnostic tests, find the genetic roots of diseases, customize medicines to each individual's unique genetic makeup--and maybe even replace defective genes with normal ones.

Venter not only beat the federal genome project's original deadline by a half-decade but also goosed his rivals to go faster. By the beginning of summer, Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the government's effort, will present its "working draft" of the genome.

The competition hasn't exactly been friendly. Collins has vilified Venter as untrustworthy and unscrupulous and said he would make the book of life "read like Mad magazine." Venter, for his part, has portrayed the official genome project as a bumbling bureaucracy. Personalities aside, the two efforts are based on very different techniques. The government scientists broke their DNA samples into segments of about 150 million letters long (the overall genome has some 3.4 billion letters). These were subdivided into segments of about 6,000 letters each, to be read by sequencing machines. In the final step, the pieces were reassembled into their original order on the chromosomes.

Venter, by contrast, took a more radical approach, smashing the DNA into millions of pieces, then feeding each into new high-speed robotic sequencers. By March 27, Celera had all of them read, though they will not be reassembled for three to six weeks. And lots more work remains to be done after that. Figuring out where those letters fall in our 100,000 or so genes, and precisely what each of these genes does, could take an additional 50 years.

Even so, researchers have begun using genome segments made public by federal scientists. Researchers at Glaxo Wellcome, the British pharmaceutical giant, have identified groups of genes involved in Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, psoriasis and migraine, and are working on drugs to counteract them.

Both Celera and the Human Genome Project will go after new genomes--among them that of the mouse. (Tellingly, the government researchers are expected to adopt Venter's technique for this task.) Reason: not only are mice useful to test potential treatments, but also--because they share many of our genes--they offer an alternative route to understanding how genes work and how they can cause disease.

In short, it will be years before the era of genome-based medicine is in full swing. But last week's achievement is an unmistakable signal that it is on the way.

--Reported by Alice Park/New York and Dick Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Alice Park/New York and Dick Thompson/Washington