The Feds Step Up the Pace

By Dick Thompson/Boston

For two years public and private scientists have been racing at a blistering pace to decode our full genetic blueprint, or genome. At times, biotech firms, spurred by dreams of giga-bucks, appeared to be in the lead. But like an Aesopian tortoise, the government scientists working with the Human Genome Project have continued pushing along. In November they announced that they had completed mapping the first billion "letters"--or basic chemical units--in our DNA's alphabet.

Last week at Bio2000, a gathering of more than 10,000 scientists, biotech entrepreneurs and patent attorneys in Boston, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research Institute, announced another major milestone. In the past four months his international consortium of public- and foundation-funded laboratories, with its robotic machinery knocking off 12,000 units every minute, has decoded another billion letters. That puts the group two-thirds of the way toward its goal of wrapping up the entire genome of 3 billion letters. "We're on the back nine," crowed Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/M.I.T. Center for Genome Research. "The race is over. It's done."

Maybe. At their stepped-up pace, the government scientists should complete their road map of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes by late June. But there are folks out there who could spoil the victory party. Scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter's company, Celera, using a riskier "shotgun" approach to plow through all those letters, is working at a furious pace as well. Only two weeks ago, he announced that Celera had completed mapping the genome of Drosophila melanogaster, a.k.a. the fruit fly, a favorite tool of lab scientists. While the fruit fly genome is far less complex than the human, Venter's tour de force (performed as a warmup to his human-genome work) indicated not only that his approach is working but also that he might well breeze through our entire genome, identifying most of its letters and lining them up in the right sequence, well ahead of his rivals.

More than vanity is at stake. If Venter's Celera wins what has become an increasingly bitter competition, government scientists fear, the human genome will be entangled in patent and licensing battles as rival drug firms seek protection for agents they are hoping to develop from the newly emerging genetic blueprint. With the announcement last week by Collins' team, though, these concerns are subsiding because Collins has been making the data public as he goes by putting it on the Internet every day. Says Lander: "Now there is no doubt that a genome will be freely available."

Collins, whose project has come under fire, had every reason to be jubilant. "This working draft [of the project's results] is going to be a gold mine of information," he says. Even in its current fragmented state, the growing, publicly available map--obtained at a cost of $250 million to date, he says--has led scientists to a host of disease genes. It is also letting them probe the genomes of other organisms for DNA that could turn out to be a mother lode for medicine.

--By Dick Thompson/Boston