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Twenty-five years ago today, President Bill Clinton stood before a podium in the East Room of the White House, and, in front of an all-star lineup of researchers and dignitaries, made a historic announcement: After years of painstaking work, scientists had created “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind” — the first-ever survey of the human genome.

Clinton was flanked on both sides by the two men who had arguably done more than anyone else to carry the project over the finish line — Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, the heads of rival projects aiming for the same bullseye.

In his remarks, Bill Clinton emphasized the value of unity and collaboration, comparing the achievement to the maps created by Lewis and Clark’s expedition into the American West — but a comparison to the space race might have been more accurate. Because, behind the scenes, the journey leading up to that day’s announcement had been one defined by nerve-wracking, cut-throat competition — a competition where every minute counted, and the future of scientific inquiry was at stake.

 

The scientific quest of a lifetime

 

Francis Collins had never intended to lead the Human Genome Project.

Back in the 1980s and 90s, he was a researcher at the University of Michigan, whose dream was to find the root cause of painful and deadly genetic disorders. He’d spent five grueling years hunting down the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, which he finally did in 1989.

“But to imagine doing this again for the hundreds or thousands of diseases that also would benefit from that kind of discovery just seemed completely unimaginable, unless you had a basic foundation of understanding of the human genome — the 3 billion letters of the human DNA code,” Collins said.

So when he started hearing talk in the late 1980s about a project that aimed to decode the entire human genome, Collins was a fan — though not everyone in the scientific community was.

According to Collins, there were three main road blocks to the project.

“First of all, it was just technologically impossible,” he said. “When you looked at our ability to read letters of human DNA, it was just impossible to think that you could scale up our very slow-moving ways of doing this into something that could attack a target as big as 3 billion letters.”

Second was the cost.

“That money might be siphoned away from other kinds of human medical research that was going to be more useful,” Collins said. “It was a competition between funds argument.” 

And the third argument, which Collins says was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely, “was that it was going to be so boring that nobody who was a good scientist would want to work on it, and it would just attract mediocrity. How much was it going to take to read out 3  billion A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s over a period? Why would anybody want to spend their time on that?”

Practical considerations aside, no one could deny the power a decoded human genome would give to researchers.

“I was absolutely convinced as a scientist that this would become fundamental to pretty much everything we would do in the future in human biology,” he said. “And I was also convinced as a physician that this was going to open the door to much better ways to diagnose, treat, and prevent a long list of diseases that we didn’t understand very well. It was so fundamental. You couldn’t be against the idea that the human genome sequence would be valuable to have.”

Congress ended up approving funding for the project — $3 billion over 15 years — and in 1990, it launched under the leadership of James Watson, the legendary biologist who won a Nobel for helping to discover the double-helix structure of DNA, along with Francis Crick. 

Collins was excited at the project’s potential.

“I was a big fan,” he said. “I applied for a genome center at the University of Michigan, received that award and thought, ‘OK, I can be part of this.’ I didn’t expect to be asked to lead the whole thing.”

Two years into the project, in 1992, James Watson stepped down from his position over a conflict with the director of the National Institutes of Health, and soon after, Collins was tapped to take his place.

He knew that leading the Human Genome Project would be a major challenge. This was an international collaboration, which meant he would be managing thousands of scientists around the world — not only their work, but their egos, not to mention billions of dollars of funding. And it was also a major commitment; the project was scheduled to conclude in 2005, which would mean giving up more than a decade of his professional life. Collins wasn’t sure he was up to it.

“I said, ‘No, this is not my dream of what my life is going to be,’” he said. “I’m having a great time in Ann Arbor doing research, teaching medical students, taking care of patients.”

But then Collins thought about what this project meant.

“You have to recognize that the genome is kind of the center of the center of everything you want to know about biology and medicine,” he said.

Within the alphabet soup of 3 billion base pairs — the fundamental units that make up DNA, represented by the letters A, T, G, and C — were the secrets to every person’s fate. Who they were, what they looked like — and more importantly, what diseases they would develop.

As Collins thought back to the five years he’d spent searching for the gene that causes cystic fibrosis, he realized that without a full map of the human genome, researchers would have to do that for each and every genetic disease.

Moreover, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A chance to take part in one of — if not the — most significant scientific quests of his lifetime.

“And you’re just going to say it’s not a convenient time?” he said. “So I changed my mind, indicated I was willing and started in April of 1993. And it was a wild ride from that day forward.”

 

 

Saving the Whitehead Center

 

When Lauren Linton agreed to sign on to the Human Genome Project in October of 1997, she had no idea what she was getting herself into.

“I came in and did not know that by February of that pilot year, four months later, we were due to be cut, because we were not doing very well,” she said.

Linton had been recruited to lead the Whitehead Institute Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology — one of the three federal centers involved in the Human Genome Project. It was a major job, but Linton was the right person to do it. She’s a scientist, but unlike a lot of the project’s other leaders, not an academic. She had cut her teeth in the competitive world of industry, having launched and led her own successful biotech company.

She had experience managing big projects in an industry setting, and the budgets that went with them — skills that, as she soon discovered, would be crucial to saving the Whitehead Center. It was one of the biggest gene sequencing centers in the country, but, by the fall of 1997, they were on the chopping block. Costs were too high, and output too low. So right away, Linton pulled together a game plan.

“I quickly got in there and developed cost modeling, process modeling, took over a lot of the program management, did a lot of biological experiments,” Linton said. “I had an R&D team to work on new methods for us that were automatable. By February, we had thoroughly improved those things and saved ourselves.”

It should’ve been smooth sailing from there — but just a few months later, in May of 1998, something happened that shocked everyone involved. Something that upended all their plans. Something that could pose an existential threat to the Human Genome Project. And that something was Craig Venter.

 

‘Biology’s bad boy’

 

CNN once called Craig Venter “biology’s bad boy,” and even now, more than two decades later, he still looks the part. At 78, the scientist and entrepreneur cuts a striking figure, with his bald pate, neatly trimmed silver beard, and steely blue eyes — though he admits that time may have sanded down a few of his sharper edges.

“Some of my harsher views may have softened a little bit since then,” he said, of his role in the 25-year-old drama.

But even the older, kinder Venter isn’t one to mince words when he reflects on the past.

“The scientific community is not necessarily the most forward-thinking community,” he said. “It’s very conservative and very parochial.”

Venter has long positioned himself as an outsider, a maverick — but back in the 1990s, he was very much a part of the official scientific community. He’d spent almost a decade working at the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, where he made a name for himself by developing a faster technique for gene discovery. 

He left the NIH in 1992 and found the nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research, a pioneer in genomics that sequenced the first complete genome of a free-living organism — a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae.

As a brash and ambitious researcher, Venter naturally wanted to be involved with the Human Genome Project. His lab initially managed to snag a piece of the puzzle — sequencing chromosome 16 — making him part of the project’s very large team. 

But that changed in the spring of 1998, when, at a meeting with some of the project’s lead scientists, Venter made a shocking announcement. Lauren Linton recalls the scene.

“Craig came late, walked in, didn’t even sit down, and announced that he’d be starting a company, and he’d be leaving the federal project,” Linton said. “He would be doing the human genome on his own, and that we could go off and do the mouse, which was very upsetting to everybody at the table.”

Venter had started his company, called Celera, with $300 million in funding from a company that manufactured DNA sequencers, which meant they had both plenty of money, and access to cutting-edge technologies, to invest in beating the Human Genome Project.

The project’s leaders were shell-shocked — not only at the perceived betrayal, but at the realization that the Human Genome Project could very well become nothing more than a footnote in the story of genomics. Even worse, they worried that the move could lead to Congress losing interest and defunding the project. 

“When Craig did this, they villainized him,” Linton said. “How could he do this? He was on the federal effort and now he’s the enemy.”

Linton, however, was less surprised by the move.

“To be honest with you, the project was ripe for a takeover,” she said.

Over the years, Venter had grown frustrated with the Human Genome Project. It was too slow, too cumbersome, too bureaucratic. But he had a solution — an approach to gene sequencing that he said was faster and more efficient. It was called “shotgun sequencing,” and from the beginning Venter had been pushing hard to adopt it.

“It was clear to me in 1995 that this was going to be the ideal method for sequencing the human genome,” Venter said. “And Collins refused to fund it. They were absolutely certain it wouldn’t work.”

From Venter’s perspective, once government funding for the Human Genome Project had been allocated — approximately $3 billion over 15 years — there was little incentive for the project to explore more efficient ways of sequencing. 

“This was a method to fund hundreds of laboratories around the world,” Venter said. “Nobody sat down with the real strategy of what could change, what might happen, that we could do to sequence the genome faster, more efficiently, quicker. It was never part of discussion because it was almost like a government make work project to fund all the genetic mappers.”

 

Mapping vs. shotgun sequencing

 

To understand what exactly Venter was proposing, it helps to know a bit about how sequencing works. 

The human genome is enormous — it includes roughly 3 billion base pairs, which are the fundamental building blocks of DNA. Each pair makes up one of the “rungs” of the ladder in the double helix, represented by the letters A, T, C and G. And each one of those billions of letters needed to be read — their order decoded —  in order to sequence the genome.

But it wasn’t possible, or practical, to sequence the whole genome all at once — it was too big. So instead, the Human Genome Project would break it into manageable chunks, and then sequence those chunks one by one. 

Before that could happen, however, it was necessary to create “maps” of where each chunk belonged on the genome, so that they could put them back together them in the right order. 

Francis Collins compares the process to putting Leo Tolstoy’s 1000-plus-page epic “War and Peace” through a shredder, mixing the pieces up, and then attempting to reassemble it.

“That’s going to be really hard,” Collins said. “If on the other hand you do it one page at a time, you might very well be able to get each page put back together, because you don’t have so many options to get it wrong.”

This was what the mapping approach provided — it reduced the risk of mis-assembly, and provided a kind of scaffold that established the overall structure of the genome.

“Once you had that, you were in a much better place to anchor your sequence and to be able to assemble it into very long stretches of highly accurate sequence,” Collins said.

So before any real sequencing could happen, genetic mappers needed to build that scaffold — a slow and deliberate process. Luckily, the project had plenty of mappers — too many, if you ask Venter.

“The genome community was dominated totally by genetic mappers who weren’t even interested in sequencing,” he said. “They were just interested in trying to find genetic diseases by mapping.”

Venter’s approach, on the other hand, called “shotgun sequencing,” skipped the mapping part — which would make the process faster, but a lot more difficult when it came to assembly. To use Collins’ “War and Peace” analogy, it was like putting the entire novel through a shredder, and then attempting to put it back together all at once, instead of moving one page at a time. 

Venter felt like he had already shown that this could work, but Collins, among others, wasn’t convinced.

“People who knew a lot about the mathematics of genome assembly were deeply skeptical that that approach could result in the kind of quality assembly of the human genome that we were promising to deliver,” he said. “So it wasn’t that his idea was rejected because it was coming from him. It was just an idea that the experts had already reached a very strong conclusion that this is not going to give the answer we need, at least not with the technology we have then.”

Once he had struck out on his own, though, Venter did develop a solution to the assembly problem. Early on, he had hired Gene Myers, a computational biologist, to spearhead a team of mathematicians and computational scientists to develop an algorithm capable of correctly assembling the pieces of the genome. Venter even had a super computer custom built — “the third-largest civilian computer in the world that filled a giant room,” he said — to execute the algorithm. 

Celera also had access to brand new — and faster — DNA sequencers, which would also speed up the process. All of this was designed to help Celera fulfill its extremely ambitious goal — to finish sequencing the human genome no later than 2001, a full four years before the Human Genome Project’s projected completion date.

“The goal was to do it as quickly as possible,” Venter said.

 

The future of medical research at stake

 

The reaction among the project’s leaders was anger and panic. 

“Yeah, human nature, you’re not going to be too excited about that,” Collins said. “But I think it was really more about the notion of what’s the ultimate outcome going to be? What’s going to matter? Are we going to end up with a sequence that’s highly accurate, the quality is really good? And we worried about the Celera approach not achieving that. And is it going to be accessible to everybody?

Collins mentions accessibility, because not only did members of the public project fear Celera running away with this big discovery — they had heard that he had plans to patent parts of the genome. And that would mean that anyone doing research on, for instance, the gene that causes muscular dystrophy might have to pay Celera for the privilege. 

“So, if we did not want that genome patented and put into the patent office so that everybody doing research from that point on on genes would have to take a license to it, we had to finish it in a year,” Lauren Linton said.

It felt like an impossible task — especially considering that the project wasn’t originally slated to finish until 2005. But Linton had come with a plan. As part of her previous efforts to revamp the Whitehead Center, she had come up with a way to scale up their sequencing. Within a few months, they were moving 20 times faster than before. In the meantime, Linton, who’s something of a maverick herself, had been thinking about how the public project could compete with Celera. And so, at another meeting several months later, she presented their progress — and then made a radical suggestion.

“I said, ‘There’s only one option here — we have to go to shotgun sequencing as well,’” she said. “Which was an uproar.”

The resistance came not only in response to the notion of adopting the same strategy as Celera, but from the project’s mappers, who dominated two of the project’s three federal centers.

“They wanted to map — to borrow that old aphorism, ‘We mapped, therefore, we mapped.’ They wanted to do it that way because that’s the way they did it,” Linton said. “It was the logical way to do it. It was the easier way to do it. But we didn’t have the luxury of that time and ease anymore.”

But there was something that helped change people’s minds. The mapping step, Linton told them, had become the biggest obstacle to moving ahead.

“If you know anything about building, an assembly line, you’re looking for your impedances. Where are your bottlenecks?” she said. “Because you need to remove them if you want the whole thing to be at a certain throughput. Well, mapping was the major impedance for the federal project.”

Now that the Whitehead Center had ramped up its sequencing, they were moving faster than the mappers, and had run out of pieces to sequence. At this rate, Linton says, there was no way they could finish in a year. To have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Celera, they would need to adopt a similar strategy as Celera.

There was just one problem — assembly; taking those millions of fragments of “War and Peace,” and putting them all back together. Computing power was one thing. But they would also need a program, an algorithm, to figure everything out.

Despite that, under pressure from Celera, Francis Collins said yes to shotgun sequencing. 

 

Enter the computer geeks

 

In December 1999, across the country, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a computer scientist named David Haussler received a call that would change his life — and the history of genomics.

“That conversation, yes, I remember that vividly,” Haussler said.

It was one of the main leaders of the Human Genome Project, and he wanted to know if Haussler would be interested in signing on to help the project “find genes” once the genome was assembled — meaning, to comb through the endless strings of base pairs that make up our DNA, and figure out where specific genes were and what each of them did. It was something Haussler already had experience with, and in fact, Celera had already tried to recruit Haussler — an invitation that, as exciting as it was, he ended up turning down.

“I really didn’t believe that it was appropriate to have the genome privatized, essentially, so that you would be charging a subscription to read the genetic heritage of the human species,” Haussler said. “That just sounded like a crass and very dangerous proposition to me.”

Haussler quickly agreed to join the federal project. He knew he would need help, so he recruited a couple of PhD students — including one named Jim Kent, who Haussler knew as a “programming genius.”

When asked to describe Kent, Haussler laughed.

“Quite the character,” he said. “You could see pictures of him. He looks like something out of Middle Earth.”

There’s something almost whimsical about Kent, whose beard and silver crown of curly hair, indeed, evokes images of a modern Gandalf.

These days, Kent is retired. But in 1999, he was a 39-year-old PhD student making a career change. He’d spent the last few years working in the nascent software industry, but had gotten bored with that, and decided to go back to school to study biology.

“I didn’t really have a super clear idea career wise, what I was going to do,” he said.

But Kent enjoyed combining coding with biology. And so, when Haussler invited him to join the Human Genome Project, Kent said yes — so long as he could take two months off to finish his thesis.

Over the Christmas holiday, Haussler and Kent formulated a plan to begin gene-finding. There was just one problem — in order to do their job, to identify specific genes and what they did — the genome had to already be assembled. And it seemed like the project wasn’t even close to figuring out how they were going to do that.

“There was a lot of work to do, and I was being asked to join the project, but it wasn’t really ready for the gene finding step,” Haussler said. “I saw a train wreck coming.”

Haussler actually went to visit one of the project centers, where a postdoc was working on the assembly problem. Although she was clearly brilliant, Haussler said, one postdoc wasn’t enough.

“It seemed like a dangerous situation to me,” he said. “So we actually started working on the assembly problem quietly.”

It wasn’t that they weren’t allowed to work on the assembly problem — it was more a matter of diplomacy. They didn’t want to step on any toes. Plus, if they did it in secret, there’d be no one looking over their shoulders, telling them how to approach the problem.

 

The competition reaches a boiling point

 

As the spring of 1999 rolled around, the competition began heating up. The media had latched onto the story and was reporting feverishly on the race between the Human Genome Project and Celera — coverage that Francis Collins calls a double-edged sword.

“On the one hand, it did cause people working on this to feel like, ‘Oh gosh, we’re in the hot lights of public scrutiny,’” he said. “On the other hand, it was great to see the public was actually interested in a project which had largely been ignored until then. It seemed like only when there was a race, and when there was a personality issue involved, and that Craig Venter has a yacht and Francis Collins has a motorcycle that it becomes something that the press wants to cover.”

Craig Venter at Celera, however, remembers the coverage getting pretty ugly.

“[James] Watson called me Hitler,” he said. “Francis Collins said we were doing the Mad Magazine version of the human genome. They just made constant public attacks.”

The media coverage meant that public pressure was mounting — and both sides were feeling it. To make things even more stressful for the public project, everyone could see how fast they were moving. That’s because, in keeping with their philosophy of scientific openness and research for the public good, they were uploading all their DNA sequence information to the internet every 24 hours.

“We felt this was such a valuable contribution to understanding human biology and human medicine that it shouldn’t sit anywhere unused for more than a day,” Collins said.

But it also meant that Celera was able to keep close tabs on how fast the public project was moving, while the public project had little sense of how fast Celera was moving. 

Under pressure, the public project’s timeline to completion began to accelerate. 

“The projections for what we needed — how much DNA we had to produce, and what we needed to do with it to assemble it into chromosomes, and then analyze those chromosomes — those projections were changing every week, as the race just got hotter and hotter,” David Haussler said.

The three federal centers sequencing DNA had ramped up production spectacularly — but it was clear that assembly was still lagging. And then, as Haussler describes it, in the spring of 2000, Francis Collins delivered some news that changed everything. 

“Out of the blue on May 9, we got on the call with Francis Collins and he said, ‘Well, I have an announcement — I made a deal with Craig Venter,’” Haussler said.

 

The pizza détente

 

Francis Collins had agreed to a truce with Celera — to end all the public acrimony and mudslinging, and to essentially declare a tie ahead of time. Instead of seeing who finished first, Collins told them, the two sides would make a joint announcement at the White House on June 26, 2000, where both would unveil their drafts of the completed genome. 

The goal was to end the increasingly ugly public battle between the public project and Celera, and bring a bit of dignity back to this historic achievement; a bit of scientific diplomacy that would mean both sides could win.

Of course, it also meant that the public project now had to finish their draft of the genome in a little over a month. The response, according to Haussler, was shocked silence.

“Mic drop at this point,” he said. “Everyone doing the project was like, ‘Francis, you did what?!’ We don’t have a genome! We don’t have an assembly! We have a huge pile of DNA that is unassembled and no clear plan to assemble it, let alone analyze it.”

To Haussler and other members of the project, the decision felt sudden, but it had actually been in the works for weeks — starting with a historic meeting. Venter and Collins have different memories of what prompted the meeting. 

“It came about because I knew President Clinton, and he through a mutual friend indicated that he wanted to stop all this rancor between NIH and Celera with all the name calling,” Venter said.

Collins, on the other hand, says that it was initially his idea — enacted through a neutral third party who was friendly with both sides, a director at the Department of Energy named Aristides Patrinos.

“I said, ‘Ari, I think we got to figure out a way to have this acrimony come to an end and turn this into a positive story,’” Collins said.

So Patrinos arranged a meeting between Collins and Venter at his house

“Ari picked the date — I think it was a Sunday — and ordered some pizza,” Collins recalled. “And we went down to Ari’s basement and had initially a pretty careful and somewhat uncomfortable conversation about whether there might be a solution here that would bring credit to the project and not just feature the tensions.”

It was awkward, of course. Collins says they talked about where each side was, how close to completion, and maybe about each of their goals for the finished genome. Other than that, neither one remembers many details about that night — including what kind of pizza they had. 

“Oh, it was something with tomato sauce,” Collins said. “What were the extra fillings? Was it pepperoni? Or was it, ham and pineapple? I don’t know.”

But they both said that the pizza party was just the start of ongoing conversations that eventually resulted in a decision to do a joint unveiling. The whole point was to ease tensions — although, within their own projects, both Venter and Collins faced backlash. 

“My decision was very unpopular with my whole team and my closest advisors,” Venter said. “Some very senior scientists in the community called me and tried to talk me out of it. They wanted me to humiliate Francis Collins and the NIH for the way they were acting. But, as we can see right now with all the cuts being made to science, the scientific community relies totally on the public trust for funding the breakthroughs to change medicine. And even though there was definitely a part of me that would have loved to publicly announce, defeat, and humiliate them, I didn’t think that was the best thing for public science.”

Collins says members of the Human Genome Project felt a similar way.

“There was certainly some sense on the team that anything other than complete victory was not what they were looking for,” he said. “And here is their project leader, who’s basically agreed to a friendly truce. And there was at first some response from some parts of the public project that was surprised and perhaps even a little offended that I had done this unilaterally without consultation.”

 

Crunch time: Kent to the rescue

 

Among members of the public project, there was a real fear that they wouldn’t be able to finish in time. Thanks to this new White House announcement, they now had roughly six weeks to finish decoding and assembling the human genome. 

David Haussler — who had originally been recruited as a gene-finder, not an assembler — was in despair. He’d been working on a computer program to assemble the pieces, but he wasn’t confident that it would work. He updated Jim Kent in an email exchange. Kent asked how Haussler’s assembly program was going. Was the code completely stable? Was Haussler confident he could get it to work, and at scale?

“I said no,” Haussler said. “And he said, ‘Well, you know, I have the makings of a program and it’s starting to work. I’m going to go ahead and try to do it faster and better my way.’ And I said, ‘Go ahead.’ I literally said, ‘Godspeed.’”

This was it. After 10 years of work by thousands of scientists, billions of dollars in funding, and with the future of genomics research at stake, it had all come down to one eccentric PhD student, Jim Kent, writing code in his garage.

“It was a lot of pressure,” Kent said. “I could see that. There was a lot of research that was depending on this.”

Luckily, behind the scenes, Kent had been thinking through the problem and had a concept for how to solve it. So over the next four weeks, he set to writing the code for his assembly program — a project that he estimates took at least 12 hours of work per day. 

“I would go over and visit him,” Haussler said. “He had a cycle of code, nap, code, nap, code, nap. He didn’t have a regular sleep cycle and he would ice his wrists whenever he was not coding because the carpal tunnel would have gotten him otherwise.”

Kent downplays the intensity of that period, but acknowledges the icing detail.

“It’s true — I would have to ice it,” Kent said. “With a repetitive stress and injury, you don’t want to overdo it and push yourself. Anyway, I did manage to not damage myself and still sort of get a lot done.”

It wasn’t just Kent working in isolation. Part of the reason he was keeping such odd hours is because he needed to correspond with the sequencing centers, not just in the U.S., but in England, Germany, and Japan.

“So once I wrote the human genome browser and could look at the data visually, I was pretty sure that it was okay,” Kent said.

But he needed to test it. So he chose chromosome 18 — one of the messier, more complicated chromosomes.

“I knew if the browser would work there, and if the assembly worked there, I would have been confident of it everywhere,” he said.

So Kent ran the program, holding his breath. And suddenly. there it was — chromosome 18 in all its completed glory. He immediately contacted Francis Collins to let him know.

 

Who really won the race?

 

From there, the project was engaged in a frantic flurry of last-minute work until they finally finished their initial assembly on June 22 — four days before the joint announcement with Celera at the White House. And three days before Celera finished their draft, according to the New York Times.

The White House ceremony presented it as a tie, but supporters of the public project have insisted that they were the real winners. Craig Venter has his own take.

“No, that’s total fiction — I don’t even know where they get that from,” he said. “They were struggling. They didn’t even know how they were going to put things together. Kent didn’t even do his work until after the White House announcement.”

Jim Kent, by the way, says he did complete most of the work before the announcement.

As for Francis Collins’ response to Venter’s claim? 

“I have not heard this particular claim before,” he said. “If that’s the case, it would have been hard to know what Celera’s achievement was because they never made the data available. So if he has that evidence, it’s never been seen.”

In the end, though, the question of who won — in fact, the whole race itself — was kind of academic. In reality, neither side was totally done. These were drafts of the human genome, meaning most of it was done, but not all of it. There were stretches of DNA that were, as Collins says, so “gnarly,” so repetitive and stuttering, that they couldn’t be completed until years later, once technology had gotten better. 

What Collins and Venter do agree on is the impact of decoding the human genome. It changed medicine, it changed science — it changed the world. 

“Now, what took me 10 years to do in the lab, any new student can do in about 30 seconds on the computer,” Venter said. “So I call it in my article [commemorating the 25th anniversary of the White House announcement] basically the equivalent of a silent revolution, because it was so revolutionary. It immediately changed everything — how everything was done, how drug discovery was done, how basic science was done. It elevated the platform. So we started a mile higher than we were before.”

What that silent revolution has enabled, Collins says, is staggering advances — in cancer research, in the treatment of genetic diseases, in precision medicine, and so much more.

“It’s transformative,” he said. “We’ve crossed a bridge into completely new territory and we’re never going to have to go back again to that. We’re the first species that we know of in the universe that’s read its own instruction book and that gives us power and responsibility about what to do about it. And none of that would have happened if we didn’t have that initial really hard slog with all those people willing to work on it — to read out those 3 billion letters and to make it all accessible for everybody with a good idea to begin to understand it.”