Venter was no stranger to ways of getting attention in the news media. By the time he met with Francis Collins, he had already alerted The New York Times to the creation of the new company to sequence human DNA. Just an hour or so after the meeting with Francis Collins he called the Times and told the paper it should go ahead and run the story. In the published account, Venter announced that he would sequence the human genome four years ahead of the public project. He would do it, he claimed, for less than a tenth of the projected cost of the public project—that is, he’d do it for less than $200 million, against the $3 billion–plus price tag of the Human Genome Project. The Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, implied that the Human Genome Project might not meet its goals and might be superfluous, now that Craig Venter and Celera had come along and were proposing to do the job much faster and much more cheaply—and at zero expense to the taxpayer. Certainly Francis Collins could not have been thrilled when he opened The New York Times the next day and read this. He hadn’t yet even given Craig Venter a reply to his offer of collaboration.
By now, there was no stopping Venter. Four days later, on May 12, Venter and Hunkapiller went to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory—James Watson’s institute—where a meeting of the heads of the Human Genome Project was taking place. Venter got up and told them, in effect, that they could just give up and stop working, since he was going to sequence the human genome tout de suite. Later that week, sitting beside Harold Varmus and Francis Collins at a press conference, Craig Venter looked out at a roomful of reporters and suggested that biology and society would be better off if the Human Genome Project stopped reading human DNA and moved forward to do the genome of…the mouse.
It was a fart in church of magnitude nine. Venter hadn’t really intended to sound so offensive, but he had never been able to keep his mouth under control in a delicate situation. “The mouse is essential for interpreting the human genome,” Venter tried to explain, but that didn’t help.
In the words of one head of a sequencing center who was at the Cold Spring Harbor meeting, “Craig has a certain lack of social skills. He goes into that meeting thinking everyone is going to thank him for doing the human genome himself. The thing blew up into a huge explosion.” The head of another center recalled, “Craig came up to me afterward, and he said, ‘Ha, ha, I’m going to do the human genome. You should go do the mouse.’ I said to him, ‘You bastard. You bastard,’ and I almost slugged him.”
They felt that Venter was trying to stake out the human genome for himself as a financial asset while at the same time stealing the scientific credit. They felt that he was belittling their work, telling them to just go do the mouse.
Furthermore, Venter said that he would make the human genome available to the public but would charge customers who wanted to see Celera’s analyzed data, and this made James Watson livid. He did not like the idea of having to pay money to Craig Venter for what he felt was the human heritage, which should be open to all for free. Watson did not deign to attend Venter’s presentation—apparently he stayed up in his blond-paneled office and made telephone calls or fumed—but he appeared in the lobby, where he walked around and, in his strange, drifting voice, said to people, “He’s Hitler. This should not be Munich.” To Francis Collins he said, “Are you going to be Churchill or Chamberlain?”
Venter left the meeting soon afterward. Watson’s remarks got back to him, of course. Venter didn’t appreciate being called the Hitler of the human genome by the discoverer of the structure of DNA. Craig Venter and James Watson seemed to stop speaking with each other after that.
“You have to understand something about Jim Watson,” Watson’s friend Norton Zinder explained to me. “Jim has a kind of verbal Tourette’s syndrome. He shoots his mouth off, and he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He can’t control it.” In this respect, Watson was remarkably like Craig Venter, Zinder pointed out. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be Jim Watson,” Zinder remarked.
“Why not?”
“Are you kidding? All he does is fly around the world to meetings, where he accepts another medal for something he did in 1953. It’s a horrible life. I suppose he likes it.”
The British leaders of the public project—John Sulston, the director of the Sanger Centre, and Michael Morgan, of the Wellcome Trust—reacted swiftly to Craig Venter’s announcement. They were in England, but they flew to the United States and the next day arrived at Cold Spring Harbor, where they found things in disarray, if not total fibrillation, over Venter’s announcement, with scientists wondering if the Human Genome Project was going to die. To a standing ovation, Michael Morgan got up and played the role of Winston Churchill. He read a statement declaring that the Wellcome Trust would nearly double its funding for the public project, and would challenge any “opportunistic” patents of the genome. “We were reacting, in part, to Craig’s suggestion that we just close up shop and go home,” Morgan later explained to me.
Venter also announced that Celera would use the whole-genome shotgun method—once again, as with his EST method, he was pushing the envelope of the possible, reaching for a new but seemingly risky technique to speed up the work of decoding the letters of DNA. The public project had chosen a more conventional method. John Sulston and Robert Waterston, the head of the sequencing center at Washington University, published a letter in Science asserting that Venter’s method would be “woefully inadequate.” Francis Collins was quoted in USA Today as saying that Celera was going to produce “the Cliffs Notes or the Mad Magazine version” of the human genome. (Collins later said that his words had been taken out of context by the reporter, and that he regretted the quote.) Norton Zinder, Watson’s friend, told me that he wasn’t at all surprised that Celera was getting ready to cream the government and decode the human DNA first. “The government will never be able to move as fast as a company,” he said. “Anyway, it’s an industrial job! That’s why Celera is beating the crap out of the government.”
THE COMPANY forged from Perkin-Elmer amid the turmoil was the PE Corporation, which was divided into two pieces, the PE Biosystems Group, the unit that was making the Prism machines, and Celera Genomics, which was using the machines to decode the human DNA. Michael Hunkapiller, who became the president of PE Biosystems, believed that he could sell a lot of machines to everyone, including to the Human Genome Project. Craig Venter’s project would demonstrate how effective the Prism machines were; it was advertising. The deal was that there was a fat profit margin in the chemicals the machines used. The chemicals had a much higher profit margin than the machine; not only that, but the chemicals actually cost far more than the machine over the machine’s lifetime. This was the razor-blade principle: if you put inexpensive razors in people’s hands, you will make money selling blades.
James Watson quietly went to some key members of Congress and persuaded them to spend more money on the public project. At the same time, the leaders of the project announced a radical new game plan: they would produce a “working draft” of the human genome a year ahead of when Venter said he’d be done. An epic race had begun.
Michael Morgan, of the Wellcome Trust, told me what he thought had happened with the creation of Celera. “From the first press release, Craig saw the public program as something he wanted to denigrate,” Morgan said. “This was our first sign that Celera was setting out to undermine the international effort. What is it that motivates Craig? I think he’s motivated by the same things that drive other scientists—personal ego, a degree of altruism, a desire to push human knowledge forward—but there must be something else that drives the guy. I think Craig has a huge chip on his shoulder that makes him want to be loved. I actually think Craig is desperate to win a Nobel Prize. He also wants to be very, very rich. There is a fundamental incompatibility there.”
One day, I ran into a young player in the Human Genome Project. He believed in the worth and importance of the public project and said that he had turned down a job offer from Celera. He didn’t have any illusions about human
nature, or about any of the major players. He said, “Here’s why everyone is so pissed at Craig. The whole project started when James Watson persuaded Congress to give him money for the human genome, and he turned around and gave it to his friends—they’re the heads of centers today. It grew into a lot of money, and then the question was, Who was going to get the Nobel Prize? In the United States, there were seventeen centers in the project, and there was no quality control. It didn’t matter how bad your data was, you just had to produce it, and people weren’t being held accountable for the quality of their product. Then Celera appeared. Because of Celera, the NIH was suddenly forced to consolidate its funding. The NIH and Francis Collins began to dump more than eighty percent of the money into just three centers—Baylor, Washington University, and MIT—and they jacked everybody else. They had to do it, because they had to race Celera, and they couldn’t control too many players. So all but three centers were cut drastically, and some of the labs closed down. Celera was not just threatening their funding but threatening their very lives and everything they had spent years building. It’s kind of sad. Now those people hang around meetings, and the leaders treat them like ‘If you’re really nice, we’ll give you a little piece of the mouse genome.’ That’s the reason so many of them are so angry at Celera. It’s easier for them to go after Craig than to go after Francis Collins and the NIH.”
AT CELERA’S HEADQUARTERS in Rockville, I was shown how human DNA was shotgunned into small pieces when it was sprayed through a hospital nebulizer that cost a dollar fifty. The DNA fragments were then introduced into E. coli bacteria and grown in glass dishes. The bacteria formed brown spots—clones—on the dishes. Each spot had a different fragment of human DNA growing in it. The dishes were carried to a room where three robots sat in glass chambers the size of small bedrooms. Each robot had an arm that moved back and forth rapidly over a dish. Little needles on the arms kept stabbing down and taking up the brown spots. Later, the bits of human DNA in the bacteria would be separated from the bacteria and run through the sequencing machines, producing little bits of human DNA code.
Craig Venter stood watching the robots move. The room smelled faintly like the contents of a human intestine. “This used to be done by hand,” he said. All the human DNA fragments would eventually wind up in the Prism sequencing machines, and what would be left, at the end, was a collection of up to twenty-two million random fragments of sequenced human DNA. Then the river of shattered DNA would come to the supercomputer, and to a computer scientist named Eugene Myers, who with his team would assemble all the broken bits of human code into the more-or-less correct order, producing the full human genome.
GENE MYERS had dark hair and a chiseled, handsome face. He wore glasses, a green half-carat emerald in his left ear, and brown Doc Martens shoes. He also had a ruby and a sapphire that he would wear in his ear, instead of the emerald, depending on his mood. He was sensitive to cold. On the hottest days of summer, Myers wore a yellow Patagonia fleece jacket, and he kept a scarf wrapped around his neck. “My blood’s thin,” he explained to me. He said the scarf was a reference to the DNA of whatever organism he happened to be working on. When I first met Myers, he was keeping himself warm in his fruit-fly scarf. It had a black-and-white zigzag pattern. Later, Myers started wearing his human scarf, which had a green chenille weave of changing stripes. He intended his scarf to make a statement about the warfare between Celera and the public project. “I picked green for my human scarf because I’ve heard that green is a positive, healing color,” he said. “I really want all this bickering to go away.” His office was a cubicle in a sea of cubicles, most of which were stocked with Nerf guns, Stomp Rockets, and plastic Viking helmets. Occasionally, Myers would put “Ride of the Valkyries” on a boom box, and in a loud voice he would declare war. Nerf battles swept through Celera whenever the tension rose. Myers fielded a compound double-action Nerf Lock ’n Load Blaster equipped with a Hyper Sight. “Last week we slaughtered the chromosome team,” he told me.
IN THE FALL, Venter announced that Celera had completed the sequencing of the fruit fly’s DNA and had begun to run human DNA through its sequencing machines—there were now three hundred of them crammed into Building One in Rockville. The Command Center was up and running, and from then on Celera operated in high-speed mode. One day that fall, I talked with the company’s information expert, a stocky man named Marshall Peterson. He took me to the computer room, in Building Two. To get into the room, Peterson punched in a security code and then placed his hand on a sensor, which read the unique pattern of his palm. There was a clack of bolts sliding back. We pushed through the door.
A chill of cold air washed over us, and we entered a room filled with racks of computers that were wired together. “We have fifty-five miles of fiber-optic cables running through this building,” Peterson said. Workmen standing on ladders were installing many more cables in the ceiling. “The disk storage in this room is five times the size of the Library of Congress. We’re getting more storage all the time. We need it.”
He took me to the Command Center, where a couple of people were hanging around consoles. A big screen on the wall showed CNN Headline News. “I’ve got a full-time hacker working for me to prevent security breaches,” Peterson said. “We’re getting feelers over the Internet all the time—people trying to break into our system.” Celera would be dealing with potentially valuable information about the genes of all kinds of organisms. Peterson thought that some of what he called feelers—subtle hacks and unfriendly probes—had been emanating from Celera’s competitors. He said he could never prove it, though. Lately, the probes had been coming from computers in Japan. He thought it was American hackers co-opting the Japanese machines over the Internet.
By October 20, forty days after Celera started running human DNA through its machines, the company announced that it had sequenced 1.2 billion letters of human code. The letters came in small chunks from all over the genome. Six days later, Venter announced that Celera had filed provisional patent applications for sixty-five hundred human genes. The applications were for placeholder patents. The company hoped to figure out later which of the genes would be worth patenting in earnest.
A gene patent gives its holder the right to make commercial products and drugs derived from the gene for a period of seventeen years. Pharmaceutical companies argue that patents are necessary, because without them businesses would never invest the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to develop a new drug and get it through the licensing process of the Food and Drug Administration. (“If you have a disease, you’d better hope someone patents the gene for it,” Venter said to me.) On the other hand, parceling out genes to various private companies could lead to what Francis Collins referred to as the “Balkanization of the human genome,” a paralyzing situation that might limit researchers’ access to genes.
Venter insisted that Celera was an information company and that patenting genes was not its main goal. He had said that Celera would attempt to get patents on not more than about three hundred human genes. Even so, it was pretty clear that Celera was hoping to nail down some very valuable real estate in the human genome—billion-dollar genes, perhaps.
All summer long, Celera’s stock had bounced around between seven and ten dollars a share. Around Halloween, as investors began to realize that the company was cranking out the human genome—and filing large numbers of patents on genes—the stock jumped up to twenty dollars a share. On December 2, the Human Genome Project announced that it had deciphered most of the code on chromosome no. 22, the second-shortest chromosome in the human genome. This made the reading of the whole genome seem doable and imminent, and Celera’s stock began a spectacular, tornadic rise of a sort that has rarely been seen in the American stock market. It shot up that day by nine points, and closed at over seventy dollars. Then, after the market’s close on Thursday, December 16, Tom Gardner, a cofounder of the Web site called the Motley Fool, announced that he was buying shares of Celera for his own por
tfolio. It was known as the Rule Breaker Portfolio, and it featured small companies that broke the rules and changed the landscape of business.
Celera came of age during the huge rise of the Internet stock-market bubble. When the news broke that Celera had been named to the Motley Fool’s Rule Breaker Portfolio, a large number of people tried to buy Celera the next morning. They drove the stock up twenty points in a matter of minutes. A few months earlier, it had been trading at seven dollars a share. Celera’s stock price looked like it was headed for Mars.
I went to visit Celera one day the following week. On that particular morning the company’s stock could not even open for trading on the New York Stock Exchange. That morning, it seemed as though all of Wall Street wanted to buy Celera. That morning a tsunami of buy orders for Celera overwhelmed the specialists on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Trading in Celera froze, while the traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange waited for sell orders to trickle in. While the stock was halted—at $101 a share—I wandered around the building.
There was a feeling of shock in the air. Everyone was aware of the trading halt in the stock; everyone in the building owned Celera stock. Just about every employee of Celera was becoming a multimillionaire, and it seemed to be happening by the minute. I felt that very little work was getting done that day at Celera, except by the robots. Employees were checking the stock quote on Yahoo! and wondering what their net worth would be in an hour or two, when the stock would finally open and start trading.
I found Hamilton Smith in his lab, puttering around with human DNA in tiny test tubes. He seemed to be the only person at the company who wasn’t very affected by the situation. He was tired and looked sleep-deprived. He explained that he was renovating his house and had stayed up all night ripping carpet out of the basement. “The carpet guys were coming in to lay new carpet in the basement, and I didn’t feel like paying them to rip out the old carpet,” he said. “It would have been expensive.” Hamilton Smith owned many thousands of shares of Celera, and his net worth was already in the many millions. He also refused to buy a new car. He had driven to work that day, as usual, in his ’83 Mercury Marquis.