WHEN James Watson helped to work out the structure of DNA more than 50 years ago, he could scarcely have dreamed he would one day see the details of his own genetic code. But, as he told a conference in London on 19 May, that could happen within a year, thanks to a company called 454 Life Sciences of New Haven, Connecticut, which has offered to sequence his genome.
The Human Genome Project, which Watson led from 1988 to 1992, took 15 years and spent several billion dollars to produce the first sequence of the human genome. Now 454 claims…
