WIRED NEWS

First Human Blueprints Complete 
Wired News Report 

3:00 p.m. Jun. 23, 2000 PDT 

The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy will hold a
press briefing on Monday to announce
the completion of two blueprints of the chemical makeup of human beings. 

Officials from the Human Genome Project as well as for-profit company Celera
Genomics will convene to make the
announcement at 12:30 EDT at the Capitol Hilton in Washington. 

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the HGP, will announce a complete
working draft of the human genome map.
Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera, will
announce what company officials call a "first
assembly" of its human genome map. 

The announcement will end an ongoing bitter race between the two groups in a
tie. 

Ari Patrinos, associate director of science for biological and environmental
research at the U.S. Department of
Energy, also will speak at the briefing. 

The public gene-sequencing program is a joint, international effort of the
Human Genome Research Institute at the
National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the Wellcome Trust
in Britain, the Whitehead Institute in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Washington University School of Medicine in
St. Louis, Baylor College of Medicine
in Houston, along with contributions from researchers in Germany and Japan. 

Each group used different methods to map the human genome, and each have
touted theirs as the best. 

Celera researchers finished the human genome map using the company's
proprietary so-called "shotgun"
technique, which was developed by Venter, the company's chief scientific
officer. 

Venter came up with the shotgun method to chop an organism's genetic
information into small bits that could be
analyzed in DNA sequencers. Scientists then use powerful computers to
reassemble the bits into a whole. 

Celera researchers break the chromosomes into bits, sequence the genes, and
then use their supercomputer to
assemble the whole genome back into place. This method has proven to be
significantly quicker than creating a
physical map, but some still question its thoroughness and accuracy. 

Celera officials announced they had completed the sequencing phase of the
human genome map in April, and since
then have been assembling it. 

HGP researchers also break chromosomes into chunks, then sequence the genes.
But they keep the genes in line
with their chromosome, then create what's called a physical map by knitting
the chromosomes back together. 

Venter has been vilified for wanting to make money from the human genome,
but he defends himself saying that a
competitive environment is the only way to insure rapid scientific
advancement. 

The company has been criticized for keeping its information private, while
the HGP posts its data on an Internet
site called GenBank every 24 hours. But Celera has promised it will publish
the information in a scientific journal --
there has even been talk of a joint paper between Celera and the HGP. 

Celera has filed provisional patent applications on 6,500 genes, but Venter
said it will probably only file actual
patents on a few hundred of these. 

With the genome complete, researchers say they have a blueprint for the
underlying biology of human life. But
they still won't know what genes do, which is where the bulk of the work
will lie in the coming years and decades.


Related Wired Links: 

Genome Mappers to Make Amends 
Jun. 22, 2000 

Genome Race a Big-Money Winner 
Jun. 5, 2000 

Investors Sue Celera 
May. 19, 2000 

Genomics: Academics in the Dust? 
May. 10, 2000 

Error in Genome Done on the Fly 
Apr. 20, 2000 

Celera Refutes Accusations 
Mar. 7, 2000 





%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%