Five years ago on a summer day in the East Room of the White House, then-President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair - the British prime minister weighing in by satellite - hailed the mapping of the human genome as "the first great technological triumph of the 21st century." It was an achievement that many said would one day lead to eradication of disease and the creation of made-to-order, individualized drugs.
On each side of the president were the beaming victors, ready to reap the spoils: a brash, but brilliant scientist named J. Craig Venter, then president of Celera Genomics Group of Rockville, and the accomplished Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, an international consortium of academic laboratories led by the National Institutes of Health.
The two factions - the first for profit, the second not - had been bitter rivals in the race to sequence human genes, egging each other forward and ultimately, diplomatically, agreeing to share worldwide credit for identifying the human recipe.
Neither, however, seemed willing to give on one point of contention: whether the data belonged in the public or private domain - until yesterday.
During a routine conference call to discuss quarterly earnings yesterday morning, Celera Genomics announced that after July 1 it would contribute much of its hard-earned DNA sequence data to public domain through the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health.
"This data just wants to be public," said a pleased Collins, who is also director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "It's the kind of fundamental information that has no direct connection to a product, it's information that everybody wants, and it will find its way into the public."
Celera Genomics, a unit of Connecticut-based Applera Corp., was unable to make a commercial success trading in the genetic information. It has spent the past three years slowly dismantling its foundation as a supplier of genetic data to instead concentrate on drug development, a transformation that will become official this summer.
"This has been a very long kind of planned exit strategy from that business," Peter Dworkin, Applera's vice president for investor relations, said in an interview. "We're coming to an end of that period."
Also coming to an official end is a contest that has raged for years, begun when Celera increased efforts to map the human genome by declaring it, too, would tackle the project, despite an eight-year head start by public laboratories.
