They Dream of Genes

Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forest of ignorance ... in the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands ... the more ignorance comes into view.

-- Matt Ridley, "Genome" (1999)

With his green felt hat tugged down over wispy black hair, and his thick black beard, Jim Kent looks like a woodcutter who has just hacked a path through a forest a whisker ahead of a band of treasure-seeking dwarves. In a way he has. Only Kent's forest consisted of 400,000 pieces of data and those "dwarves" were employees of biotech giant Celera Genomics. As for the treasure that both Kent and Celera sought, it was a document of unparalleled worth -- the first rough draft of the complete human genome.

The human genome is best compared to a very long yet very compressed book -- a biological Zip drive, if you will -- tucked inside the nucleus of each of the 100 trillion cells of our bodies. Organized into 23 chapters, one for each chromosome, each genome contains encoded instructions that help shape appearance, intelligence, health and behavior. No single human genome is the definitive edition of our book of life. Yet each version contains a how-to-manual for putting together a human being.

Little wonder, then, that the public and private sectors ended up competing to be the first to put together this priceless document. It was a high-stakes race with access to -- and control of -- the knowledge contained in our genetic blueprint at stake. More surprising was that Kent, a graduate student at University of California at Santa Cruz, became the unlikely hero of this sprint.

Trying to access the secret of life has always been a diabolical business -- it cost Adam and Eve their paradise, Dracula and Faust their souls and Dr. Frankenstein his sanity. But in 1953, scientists Francis Crick and James Watson seemed to have found the secret without striking any satanic deals.

They discovered that DNA contained a code written along a spiraling double helical staircase. This code could copy itself, potentially into infinity, using only four chemical letters (A, T, G and C). But unraveling this code proved to be a riddle of Tolkienesque proportions, one that biologists are still working on.

As Kent puts it, "It's like we've painstakingly laid out the Dead Sea scrolls and photocopied them, but we still only have a vague understanding of what language they're written in."

To complicate matters, the information in these "scrolls" is so vast it could fill 800 Bibles, but so compressed it could fit on the head of a pin. Yet by 1995, an academic consortium of scientists had already been chipping away for five years at the massive task of mapping all this data under the publicly funded umbrella of the Human Genome Project.

Research Wars

The Human Genome Project had first been envisioned 10 years earlier by former UCSC chancellor Robert S. Sinsheimer. At first, biologists had resisted the idea. Mapping the human genome was the biological equivalent of putting a man on the moon, and some feared that its cost -- an estimated $3 billion -- would suck dry the well of microbiological research funds. But the vision prevailed, and by 1990, the Human Genome Project was up and plodding, financed by the U.S. National Institute of Health and England's philanthropic Wellcome Trust.

More than a thousand scientists in the United States and England, as well as in France, Germany, China and Japan, toiled away using slow but methodical research techniques, and by 1998 they had mapped 90 percent of our genetic blueprint for life.

And that's when a privately launched bombshell hit.

In May 1998, Dr. Craig Venter, a brilliant and controversial scientist, announced he was forming a company (which would later become Celera) with the objective of sequencing the human genome first -- and patenting the results.