Panic in Level 4

fast. A month later, Norton Zinder, Watson’s friend, flew to California to see the machine. Zinder saw it, too. “It was just a piece of equipment sitting on a table, but I said, ‘That’s it! We’ve got the genome!’” he recalled. Zinder joined Celera as a member of its board of advisers, and received stock in the company, which considerably enriched him. Now he could take a lesson from Eric Lander; he could cash in on the biotech boom. (“And what’s wrong with that?” he asked me. “The chemists have been cleaning up all their life. Now the biologists are starting to get their hands on the money, and people are saying, ‘Whoo, that’s not kosher!’ What’s not kosher about it?”)

After Norton Zinder got involved financially and scientifically in the Celera effort to race past the Human Genome Project, it led to some strains between him and James Watson. They maintained their friendship but finally had to agree not to speak about Celera with each other. They evidently feared that one or both of them could have a stroke arguing about Craig Venter.

* * *

ONE DAY not long after Norton Zinder saw the Prism machine and realized it was going to revolutionize the reading of DNA, Craig Venter and Mike Hunkapiller walked into the office of Harold Varmus, the director of the NIH, to talk to him about something. Harold Varmus was a Nobel laureate and an expert in genes and DNA. He had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1989 (with J. Michael Bishop) for a theory of cancer-causing genes—a model of how cancer arises from genes embedded in a person’s code. In Varmus’s office that day, Craig Venter wanted to talk about the human code and the ongoing effort to read it. He announced the pending formation of a corporation, to be led by himself, that was going to decode the human genome. (Celera did not yet have a name.) Venter proposed to Varmus that the company and the public project collaborate, sharing their data and—this point is enormously important to scientists—sharing the publication of the human genome, which meant sharing the credit and the glory for having done the work. This included, of course, the unspoken possibility of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Nobel Prize would seem to have been made for the team that first decrypted the human DNA.

Harold Varmus was skeptical. He suspected that this wasn’t a sincere offer from Craig Venter. He wondered if Venter might be angling for something that would be good for Craig Venter but maybe not so good for the Human Genome Project. He told Venter that he needed time to consider the proposal, particularly to check back with his subordinate Francis Collins (the head of the NIH’s part of the Human Genome Project), to see what Collins thought of this unusual offer of collaboration.

Later that same day, Craig Venter and Mike Hunkapiller drove to Dulles Airport, where they met Francis Collins at the United Airlines Red Carpet Club. There they personally offered collaboration to Collins.

Venter recalled later that Collins seemed upset with his offer. Collins recalled that he merely asked Venter for some time to consider it. Extra time was one thing that Craig Venter was not prepared to give Francis Collins.

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.”