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James Watson, President, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1993.
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Craig Venter, cofounder of Celera Genomics Corporation.
Audio Glossary
Human Genome Project, CDNA library, Genetic map, Genetic marker, Genome, Human artificial chromosome (HAC), Physical map, Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), PrimerVideo Interviews
Dr. Francis Collins is the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The video, courtesy of NHGRI, comes from the June 2000 press conference announcing the completion of the Project.
Clip 1 (0:27)
Initial objections to the Human Genome Project.
Clip 2 (1:09)
The NHGRI's sequencing strategy.
Clip 3 (0:38)
How many genes do we have?
Clip 4 (0:52)
Using the Project's data to find genetic variations among people.
Clip 5 (0:47)
What we need to do to understand our genome.
Clip 6 (1:20)
Medical advances that will spring from the Project.
Clip 7 (0:43)
Your genome fits on a DVD, or you can access it from the Internet.
Dr. Venter is the founder, president, and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics.
Clip 1 (0:34)
Venter's experiences as a medic in the Vietnam War.
Clip 2 (0:42)
Origins of the EST project.
Clip 3 (0:54)
What are ESTs used for?
Clip 4 (0:43)
Shotgun sequencing.
Clip 5 (1:13)
Problems using shotgun method on Drosophila.
Clip 6 (1:06)
How much computing power is needed to crunch genome data?
Clip 7 (1:09)
Venter's views on patenting.
Craig Venter and Francis Collins represent the commercial and the federally-funded efforts of the Human Genome Project. JOHN CRAIG VENTER (1946-)
J. Craig Venter began the race to sequence the human genome when he unexpectedly announced to a room full of genome researchers that they could just quit now, thank you, because his company would finish the job. People who like him say he never filters his thoughts and he shoots from the hip. Others have been less diplomatic, calling him an egomaniac, an idiot, and a shallow man. John Craig Venter was born on October 14, 1946 in Salt Lake City, the youngest son of an excommunicated Mormon who drank too much, smoked too much, and died at 59. The family moved to a working class suburb south of San Francisco and lived in a house next to the train tracks. Venter enjoyed playing chicken with the trains and surfing the chilly waves in nearby Half Moon Bay. In high school, Venter excelled in shop class. After graduating, he moved to Newport Beach to surf warmer waves, and then enlisted in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Detecting more intelligence in him than his high school record indicated, the Navy trained him as a medical corpsman and shipped him to the Da Nang hospital. "I was there during the Tet offensive," he said. "I got introduced to medicine in probably the toughest way possible. I just got fascinated with the lack of knowledge we had and had a desire to do something more." After finishing his tour - which included two stints in the brig for disobeying orders - Venter went to the University of California, San Diego to become a doctor. He was deflected from that path by a class with Gordon Sato and a project with Nate Kaplan. "I got so fascinated with science," he said, "I decided to heck with medical school." Venter breezed through his undergraduate and graduate schooling in six years, worked at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and was recruited to the National Institutes of Health in 1984. In the early 1990s, Venter developed the EST method of finding genes, and promoted it as cheaper and faster than the Human Genome Project that was just getting started. Project administrators disagreed, but in the meantime, the NIH decided to patent Venter's gene fragments. The Patent Office eventually rejected the patents, but the applications sparked an international controversy over patenting genes whose functions were still unknown. The Human Genome Project's director, James Watson, opposed patenting and quit. Venter left NIH to form his own non-profit institute, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). Venter continued EST work at TIGR, but also began thinking about sequencing entire genomes. Again, he came up with a quicker and faster method: whole genome shotgun sequencing. He applied for an NIH grant to use the method on Hemophilus influenzae, but started the project before the funding decision was returned. When the genome was nearly complete, NIH rejected his proposal saying the method would not work. As he turned his focus to the human genome, Venter left TIGR and started the for-profit company Celera, a division of PE Biosystems, the company that makes the latest and greatest sequencing machines. Using these machines, and the world's largest civilian supercomputer, Venter finished assembling the human genome in just three years. Venter lives with his wife - Claire Fraser, president and director of TIGR - outside Washington, D.C. where he keeps his tablesaws in the garage, safely away from his new Porsche. Venter relaxes by sailing his 80 foot yacht, The Sorcerer, across the Atlantic (www.tigr.org/journey/). FRANCIS COLLINS (1950-)
If sequencing the human genome is the Holy Grail of biology, then Francis Collins is its King Arthur. Collins has overseen the mapping, the sequencing, and the funding of biology's first "big science" project as the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993. For someone so intimately connected with the hottest topic in biology, Francis Collins oddly had no interest in biology as he grew up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Both parents were involved in the arts - his father was a drama professor at Mary Baldwin College - and produced plays on the stage they built on the farm. Collins's mind was elsewhere and frequently filled with numbers as he contemplated the infinite outcomes of dividing by zero. In high school, his mathematical interests turned to chemistry, but biology held no appeal. "There didn't seem to be any logic to it - all we did was dissect things and memorize body parts," he said in an interview with Arts and Sciences Magazine. Collins entered the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar after graduating from high school at 16. He played the guitar too much in the first year, but afterward became "one of those science nerds you would not enjoy being in class with." In 1970, he left Virginia with a degree in chemistry, and headed to Yale for graduate school. There, Collins finally learned that biology could be logical when he was "blown away" by a course in molecular biology. Combined with a drive to do something more obviously meaningful than theoretical physics, Collins went to medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill after completing his doctorate, then returned to Yale for a post-doc in human genetics. At Yale, Collins began working on ways to search the genome for genes that cause human disease. He continued this work, which he dubbed "positional cloning," after moving to the University of Michigan as a professor in 1984. Five years later, Collins had his first big success with the method when he pinpointed the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. He continues to search for disease genes at NIH, and he pastes a new sticker onto the back of his motorcycle helmet every time he finds one. | |
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LinksNational Human Genome Research InstituteThe latest news from the National Human Genome Research Institute, the organization that directed the publicly funded sequencing effort. CeleraThe company that directed the commercial venture to sequence the human genome. Homo sapiens Genome ViewerThis NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) viewer has up-to-date information on the location of genes, markers, and BAC clones on the human genome. Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues3% of the Genome Project's budget is spent researching the ethical, legal, and social issues surrounding the Project. This site from the Department of Energy describes some of these issues, including gene testing, patenting, and behavioral genetics. Online Mendelian Inheritance in ManThis database is a catalog of human genes and genetic disorders authored and edited by Dr. Victor A. McKusick and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. Bibliography
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