IT WAS the event of the century—admittedly it’s a brand new century and
so the bar is rather low, but it’s a big deal all the same. I’m talking, of
course, about this month’s publication of the complete sequence of the human
genome.
The big shots who run the two competing sequencing ventures, Francis Collins
of the National Institutes of Health and Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, are
talking to each other again. That’s quite an achievement, since they sent their
respective sequence databases to different publications: Collins’s public
product went to Nature, while Venter’s private one went to…
