Craig Venter and the publicly funded Human Genome Project have a long and somewhat sordid history. Seven years later, Venter apparently cannot allow a milestone involving the Human Genome Project go by without getting some of the limelight.
An embargoed press release announced last week that fellow scientists would present James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and the first director of the $3 billion Human Genome Project, with a sequence of all his genes on two DVDs. Watson's genome would also be deposited into GenBank, which is available online for free to anyone who cares to sift through its billions of A, C, T, G sequences. It would be the first entire human genome to be publicly available. A ceremony was held in Houston on Thursday. (Note: the 79-year-old Nobel laureate declined to make available information about a gene associated with Alzheimer's disease; he doesn't want to know.)
Meanwhile, Venter, the former CEO of Celera, the company that raced the Human Genome Project to sequence the entire human genome back in 2000, geared up to make his own announcement. Last week, he deposited his own genome into GenBank.
Venter was fired from Celera in 2002. He moved on to other things, but clearly he hasn't completely let go of his human genome days. Read more about the competitive history of the public versus private efforts
here, here, here, and here.
Genome of DNA Discoverer is Deciphered [New York Times]
