The conventional route for announcing scientific breakthroughs is publication in a scientific journal. Both Celera and the Human Genome Project were planning to publish annotated versions of the human genome as soon as possible. Although the two sides looked like armies maneuvering for advantage, the leaders of the Human Genome Project had always denied that they were involved in some kind of competition with Craig Venter.
“They’re trying to say it’s not a race, right?” Venter said to me, in a shrugging sort of way. “But if two sailboats are sailing near each other, then by definition it’s a race. If one boat wins, then the winner says, ‘We smoked them,’ and the loser says, ‘Eh, we weren’t racing—we were just cruising.’”
I first met Craig Venter on a windy day in the summer of 1999, at Celera’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, a half-hour drive northwest of Washington, D.C. The company’s offices and laboratories occupied a pair of five-story white buildings with mirrored windows, surrounded by beautiful groves of red oaks and yellow poplar trees. One of the buildings contained rooms packed with row after row of DNA-sequencing machines of a type known as the ABI Prism. The other building held what was said to be the most powerful civilian computer array in the world. The Celera supercomputer complex was of considerable interest to Gregory and David Chudnovsky, the mathematicians who had used a homemade supercomputer to calculate the number pi, and who ended up meeting with Craig Venter and his staff, talking with them about the design of supercomputers and software used in sequencing the human genome. Venter’s supercomputer complex was surpassed only, perhaps, by that of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is used for simulating nuclear bomb explosions.
The computer building at Celera also contained the Command Center. This was a room stuffed with control consoles and computer screens. The Command Center was manned all the time. It monitored the flow of DNA inside Celera. The DNA was flowing through the machines twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
That hot summer day, Craig Venter moved restlessly around his office. There had been a spate of newspaper stories about the race to decode the complete genome, and about the pressure Celera was putting on its competitors. “We’re scaring the crap out of everybody, including ourselves,” he said to me.
Venter was fifty-three at the time. He had an active, cherubic face on which a smile often flickered. He was bald, with a fuzz of short hair at the temples, and his head was usually sunburned. He had bright blue eyes and a soft voice. That day, he was wearing khaki slacks and a blue shirt, New Balance running shoes, a preppy tie with small turtles on it, and a Rolex watch. Venter’s office looked out into stands of trees; leaves were spinning on branches outside the windows, flashing their white undersides and promising thunderstorms. Beyond the trees, a chronic traffic jam was occurring on the Rockville Pike. Celera was in an area along a stretch of Interstate 270 known as the biotechnology corridor, which was dense with companies specializing in the life sciences, and billions of dollars in venture capital were embedded in bioenterprises all around Celera.
Celera Genomics was a part of the PE Corporation, which had been called Perkin-Elmer before the company’s chief executive, Tony L. White, split the business into two parts: PE Biosystems, now called Applera, which made the DNA sequencing machine called the Prism, and Celera. Venter owned five percent of Celera’s stock. It had been trading, often violently, on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock had been tossed by waves of panic selling and panic buying. That particular summer day, the stock market was valuing Celera at around three billion dollars. Craig Venter’s own net worth had been slopping around by five or ten million dollars a day in either direction, like water going back and forth in a bathtub.
“Our fundamental business model is like Bloomberg’s,” Venter said. “We’re selling information about the vast universe of molecular medicine.” Venter hoped, for example, that one day Celera would help analyze the genomes of millions of people as a regular part of its business. This would be done over the Internet, he felt—and, having decoded individual patients’ DNA, the company would then help design or select drugs tailored to patients’ particular needs. In recent times, genomics has been moving so fast that it’s possible to think that pretty soon you will be able to walk into a doctor’s office and have your own genome read and interpreted. It could be stored in a smart card. (You would want to keep the card in your wallet, in case you landed in an emergency room. But you wouldn’t want to lose it, because if thieves got your DNA sequence, they might
Venter stopped moving briefly, sat down in front of a screen, and tapped a keyboard. A Yahoo! quote came up. “Hey, we’re over twenty today,” he said. Meanwhile, I was standing in front of a large model of Venter’s yacht, the
Venter went into the hallway, and I followed him. Celera was renovating its space, and tiles were hanging from the ceiling. Some had fallen to the floor. Black stains dripped out of air-conditioning vents, and sheets of plywood were lying around. Workmen were Sheetrocking walls, ripping up carpet, and installing light fixtures, and the smell of paint and spackle drifted in the air. We took the stairs to the basement and entered a room that held about fifty Prism DNA-sequencing machines. Each Prism was the size of a small refrigerator and had cost three hundred thousand dollars. Prisms were the fastest DNA sequencers on earth. At the moment, they were reading the DNA of the fruit fly. This was a pilot project for the human genome. The machines contained lasers, which were used for reading the letters in DNA. Heat from the lasers seemed to ripple from the machines. The lasers were shining light on tiny tubes through which strands of fruit-fly DNA were moving, and the light was passing through the DNA, and sensors were reading the letters of the code. Each machine had a computer screen on which blocks of numbers and letters were scrolling past. It was fly code.
“You’re looking at the third-largest DNA-sequencing facility in the world,” Venter said. “We also have the second largest and the largest.”
We got into an elevator. The walls of the elevator were dented and bashed. Venter led me into a vast, low- ceilinged room that looked out into the trees. This was the largest DNA-decoding factory on earth. The room contained 150 Prisms—forty-five million dollars’ worth—and more Prisms were due to be installed any day. Just below the ceiling, air ducts dangled on straps, and one wall consisted of gypsum board.
Venter moved restlessly through the unfinished space. “This is the most futuristic manufacturing plant on the planet right now,” he said. Outdoors, the rain came, splattering on the windows, and the poplar leaves shivered. We stopped and looked over a sea of machines. “You’re seeing Henry Ford’s first assembly plant,” he said. “What don’t you see? People, right? There are three people working in this room. A year ago, this work would have taken one thousand to two thousand scientists. With this technology, we are literally coming out of the dark ages of biology. As a civilization, we know far less than one percent of what will be known about biology, human physiology, and medicine. My view of biology is ‘We don’t know squat.’”
Some observers thought the company could fail. It was burning through at least $150 million a year. This flow of money going out of Celera was what venture capitalists called the “burn rate” of a start-up company—its negative cash flow, its consumption of money without (yet) producing a cash return on the investment. Who, I wondered, would want to buy the information the company was generating, and how much would they pay for it? “There will be an incredible demand for genomic information,” Venter assured me. “When the first electric-power companies strung up wires on power poles, there were a lot of skeptics. They said, ‘Who’s going to buy all that electricity?’ We already have more than a hundred million dollars in committed subscription revenues over five years from companies that are buying genomic information from us—Amgen, Novartis, Pharmacia & Upjohn, and others. After we finish the human genome, we could do the mouse, rice, rat, dog, cow, corn, maybe apple trees, maybe clover. We could do the chimpanzee.”
ONE DAY AT CELERA’S HEADQUARTERS, I was talking with a molecular biologist named Hamilton O. Smith. Smith, an extremely distinguished figure in the history of molecular biology, won a Nobel Prize in 1978 as a codiscoverer of restriction enzymes, which are used to cut DNA in specific places. Scientists use these enzymes like scissors, chopping up pieces of DNA so that they can be studied or recombined with other pieces of DNA. Without the DNA-cutting scissors that Hamilton Smith discovered, there would be no such thing as genetic engineering or
