The often bitter race to map the human genetic system appears to have ended in a dead heat.
Competing researchers both say they've completed a working draft, which maps 90 percent of the chemical units making up a human's genetic heritage.
Scientists with the internationally funded Human Genome Project, as well as researchers from Celera, a for-profit genomics company, agreed to end their rivalry and keep the focus on science.
The working draft of the human genome map will provide scientists with the biological foundation of human life. Researchers say the complete map may herald a revolution in medicine, giving physicians the material they need to predict, prevent, and even treat disease.
President Clinton certainly thinks so, calling the draft "the most wondrous map ever produced by humankind."
But there are skeptics. Some scientists say that while the rivalry between the two groups has captured public attention, the human genome map will actually have little direct impact on medicine.
"People may not understand genes or genomes but they certainly understand a race," said Bill Haseltine, president and CEO of Human Genome Sciences.
The map won't help medical doctors, the skeptics maintain, because knowing where genes lie along the 23 chromosomes fails to reveal how a gene functions or how to treat or predict disease.
"How it's going to help me develop drugs or do anything, I really don't have a clue," said Craig Rosen, executive vice president for research and development at Human Genome Sciences.
HGP researchers have been racing neck and neck with Celera, which said last year that it would map the entire human genome in less than a year and for a fraction of the cost of the 10-year, $2 billion HGP.
And if the lab-based rivalry wasn't enough, Francis Collins, the director of the HGP and Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera, have exchanged harsh words over each other's research techniques and integrity, lending drama to an otherwise tedious scientific experiment. That all came to an end Monday, apparently.
Words aside, even Human Genome Project researchers admit the map won't be useful right away.
"It's like being given the best book in the world, but it's in Russian, and it's incredibly boring to read," said Ewan Birney, a team leader at the European Bioinformatics Research Institute, part of the Sanger Centre, one of the major labs working on the Human Genome Project.
Birney's is the only government lab working to determine what the genes actually do, a field often called genomics. Genomics is the science that Haseltine -- as well as company officials at other genomics companies like Incyte, Millennnium Pharmaceuticals, and DoubleTwist -- believe will ultimately revolutionize medicine.
"A much bigger quest (is) identifying what all of the various genes in the genome mean for our health and well-being," said John Couch, chief executive officer of DoubleTwist, a Berkeley, California company.
Much of the genome map will be superfluous, Haseltine said, because 97 percent of the human genome is what's called "junk DNA," meaning it contains no genes.
"Nature has been cruel," Haseltine said. "The biologically important, protein-encoding genes in the human genome are fragmented and dispersed amidst this genetic junk, like so many pieces of needles in an enormous DNA haystack."
Genomics companies have been effectively using genes to research possible drugs for the past five years, without the need for the entire genome map, he said.
Human Genome Sciences placed four drugs in clinical trials in the past three years -– a significant number when compared to the struggle most pharmaceutical companies go through to get one drug per year to the clinic.
Still, the task is a huge accomplishment. Each group of scientists will have decoded 3.2 billion units of chemicals that make up the DNA in a human. Each unit is a nucleotide represented by the letters A, C, T, and G -- about the same number of letters in 2,000 copies of War and Peace.
Many scientists compare the human genome mapping project to the first moon landing in 1969. The actual landing didn't engender anything particularly useful –- it was more an awesomely elaborate science project. Still, anyone old enough to remember the event can tell you exactly where they were when the astronauts landed.
The human genome mapping project "is important as a milestone of human technology just like landing on the moon was," Haseltine said, noting in that case that "the real progress was in space communication."
Indeed, creating the human genome map may have produced important, lasting advances in science and medicine. DNA sequencing machines have made possible in 15 seconds what once took years, according to Venter. But the human genome map itself will not lead directly to drugs -– i.e. revenue -– for companies.
"It's a worthy academic project," Rosen said. "But for a company to do it, I do question their business model."
