Stop human genome draft, says Venter

Chemistry and Industry, April 17, 2000

The publicly-funded Human Genome Project (HGP) should not be allowed publish a rough draft of the human genome, Celera Genomics president and chief scientific officer Craig Venter told the US Congress, after claiming his private company had this month completed the sequencing phase of one person's genome.

'You should urge (HGP) investigators to keep their standards at the highest levels established in the genomics field and not rush to publish preliminary data for the sake of claiming priority,' he said in evidence to the Energy & Environment Subcommittee of the Committee on Science. 'There is no example of the results of any genome sequence project being published in the scientific literature prior to meeting the established quality, order and completeness standards. It would be poor science policy and a terrible precedent for the young genomics field,' he warned. Despite this, he expressed interest in pursuing discussions about collaboration with the HGP.

Francis Collins of the HGP hit back, disputing Venter's claim. 'You should not take at face value any claim by any group for at least two years that says we have finished sequencing a human genome sequence,' he said.

Celera's claim comes only seven months after starting work on sequencing the human genome using its whole genome shotgun method (C&I 2000, 237).

'Now we will turn our computational power to the task of ordering the human genome, said Venter. 'We intend to complete and publish the human data in a form that is consistent with the high-quality Drosophila genome that Celera achieved in collaboration with the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (Science, 2000, 287, 2181). This is expected to allow researchers worldwide and our subscribers to utilise our data to make important medical advances.'

Venter also defended Celera against charges that it intends to withhold information and delay progress. 'One of Celera's founding principles is that we will release the entire consensus human genome sequence freely to researchers on Celera's Internet site when it is completed,' he told the Congressional subcommittee. 'We will place no restrictions on how scientists can use these data. They can publish research results derived from these data, or seek intellectual property protection on discoveries using these data. The only protection that we have indicated that we would seek is database protection, as exists in Europe, to inhibit other database companies from selling the Celera database.'