Description:

The long-awaited story of the science, the business, the politics, the intrigue behind the scenes of the most ferocious competition in the history of modern science—the race to map the human genome.
On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life—seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government’s Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich. Calling his company Celera (from the Latin for “speed”), he assembled a small group of scientists in an empty building in Rockville, Maryland, and set to work.
At the same time, the leaders of the government program, under the direction of Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, began to mobilize an unexpectedly unified effort to beat Venter to the prize—knowledge that had the potential to revolutionize medicine and society.

The stage was set for one of the most thrilling—and important—dramas in the history of science. The Genome War is the definitive account of that drama—the race for the greatest prize biology has had to offer, told by a writer with exclusive access to Venter’s operation from start to finish. It is also the story of how one man’s ambition created a scientific Camelot where, for a moment, it seemed that the competing interests of pure science and commercial profit might be gloriously reconciled—and the national repercussions that resulted when that dream went awry.

About the Author

James Shreeve is the author of The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origin, and coauthor of Lucy’s Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, National Geographic, Science, Smithsonian, and other publications. He has been a fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and of the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Shreeve lives in South Orange, New Jersey.

From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

The long-awaited story of the science, the business, the politics, the intrigue behind the scenes of the most ferocious competition in the history of modern science--the race to map the human genome.
On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life--seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich. Calling his company Celera (from the Latin for "speed"), he assembled a small group of scientists in an empty building in Rockville, Maryland, and set to work.
At the same time, the leaders of the government program, under the direction of Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, began to mobilize an unexpectedly unified effort to beat Venter to the prize--knowledge that had the potential to revolutionize medicine and society.
The stage was set for one of the most thrilling--and important--dramas in the history of science. "The Genome War is the definitive account of that drama--the race for the greatest prize biology has had to offer, told by a writer with exclusive access to Venter's operation from start to finish. It is also the story of how one man's ambition created a scientific Camelot where, for a moment, it seemed that the competing interests of pure science and commercial profit might be gloriouslyreconciled--and the national repercussions that resulted when that dream went awry.

"From the Hardcover edition.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From AudioFile

Erik Singer's sophisticated but young-sounding voice brings to life a story about the unlocking of the human genetic code. It's the right voice for a definitive account of the cutting edge of medical science. Shreeve's text is suited for popular audiences with an interest in this matter. He explains the science without overwhelming the reader in jargon and presents a great narrative of the Genome Project. He also shows that this important new enterprise is significantly connected to business and political interests. Singer's vocal characterizations and dramatic interpretation contribute significantly to the story presented. M.L.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Serendipity, not to mention pure entrepreneurial tenacity, played a huge role in the quest to unravel the complete human DNA code, which is detailed in this fascinating narrative from Shreeve (The Neanderthal Enigma). Brash and bold biologist Craig Venter, the central player in this drama, is a polarizing figure, one who finds his new company Celera (Latin for "speed") going head-to-head with the National Institutes of Health. The stakes: bragging rights for a discovery that will have long-reaching applications to human health and longevity and a body of data that could be immensely profitable-that is, if Venter can figure out how to make money from the genome code without defying his promise to make the information freely available to the public. Singer has a pleasant voice, firm and authoritative. Books like this seldom need character voices, but Singer uses different inflections and tones for each of the many principal players, which adds a touch of drama and color to the tale. The story can be elliptical and repetitive-after a while, one conference call or heated exchange begins to sound like another-and is almost twice as long as it needs to be. Science aficionados, however, will savor every detail.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1
MAY 1998: "YOU CAN DO MOUSE"

On May 8 of that year, three months before the Nantucket race, Nicholas Wade, a veteran science writer for the New York Times, entered the lobby of the St. Regis hotel on Fifth Avenue. The day before, he had received a call from a public relations representative of the Perkin Elmer Corporation in suburban Connecticut, offering him an exclusive story on an exciting development. Wade was leery. Public relations people often overestimate the media interest in their company's announcements. In the brash, upstart world of biotechnology, moreover, Perkin Elmer was an unglamorous player--a maker of instruments, not news. But the PR rep mentioned that Craig Venter was a player in the new enterprise. Wade knew that Venter would not be involved in anything unglamorous. He agreed to meet with Perkin Elmer's executives over breakfast.

Wade crossed the lobby and squeezed into an elevator just as its doors began to close. A slightly built, mild-mannered Englishman in his fifties, the Times reporter attracted little attention from the dark-suited businessmen already in the elevator. In the Perkin Elmer suite on the fourteenth floor, he was introduced to CEO Tony White and two other company executives. One was Peter Barrett. The other was Michael Hunkapiller, head of Perkin Elmer's Applied Biosystems division, near San Francisco. Wade knew him by reputation. Largely unknown outside the biotech world, Hunkapiller was a legend within it. In the late 1980s, he had co-invented a machine that could automatically sequence DNA--that is, read out the order of a short stretch of chemical letters in the genetic code. Since then his technical genius and business acumen had made him the linchpin of an ongoing effort to develop better, faster instruments for sequencing DNA and speeding up other biotechnical processes.

A lavish breakfast buffet had been set up on a sideboard. Craig Venter was not in the room, but his voice greeted Wade from a speakerphone sitting on a coffee table. "Hey, Nick," he said, in a disarmingly mild tone. "Thanks for coming in so early. There's something we wanted you to be the first to know. Are you sitting down?"

Wade took a chair and opened his notebook. First Venter talked, then Hunkapiller, then Venter again at greater length. Tony White offered an occasional comment, in a broad southern drawl. No one touched the breakfast. Wade sat erect, furiously taking notes. He left an hour and a half later, certain that he had the lead story for the coveted front page of the Sunday edition of the Times.

"Genome" is not a pretty word. Even when you say it in a normal tone of voice, you sound like you're mumbling. It has so recently come into common usage that until 1997, almost a decade after the Human Genome Project began, Microsoft Word's spell-checker assumed that anyone writing about the enterprise had made a typo and corrected it to "the Human Gnome Project." In 1999, bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania was invited to address a meeting of state legislators who were puzzled over the issue of human cloning. Caplan asked the lawmakers if they knew where their genome was located. Roughly one third answered that it was in the brain, and another third thought it was in the gonads. The others weren't sure.

In fact, two copies of your genome--one contributed by each of your parents--are spooled on the twenty-three chromosomes inside the nucleus of every one of your cells--brain, gonad, bone, skin, guts, muscle, mucus, and every other kind of cell, except for red blood. The spool is fantastically compact. Each copy is a double-stranded molecule of DNA only 79 billionths of an inch wide, but which, stretched out, would run almost six feet in length. Upon this attenuated thread--imagine a clothesline running the length of the United States, then back again--lie the chemical instructions that have informed the development of your body and brain from the moment you were conceived. The individual units of instruction are called genes. They are composed of strings of the four chemical bases of DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine--abbreviated A, T, G, and C by scientists. The cell's machinery forms the letters into a series of three-letter words that combined give the recipe for the construction of a specific protein: an enzyme that helps you digest a tuna sandwich, an antibody molecule marshaled to fight off an infection, a receptor protein in your brain that helps you read and understand this paragraph. There are a lot of extra letters in the genome, sloppily referred to as "junk DNA," which do not spell out protein recipes but may serve some other purpose, perhaps vital, perhaps not. The whole human genome contains about 3 billion letters, and is often compared to the text of a book. If you decided to read the book aloud and recited one letter every second, it would take you eleven years to get to the end.

Even if someone had eleven years to spare for such a project, a simple recitation of the DNA letters would give no hint whatsoever of the way the whole genome works to create and operate a human life. Instead of thinking of the genome as a book, imagine it as a piano keyboard. Each piano key represents one gene. If you press down on a key, you hear a single note: the protein that the gene expresses. If you press the key again, you will hear the same note again, monotonously, every time the key is played. But with a piano keyboard, you can do much more than play lots of individual notes. You can combine the notes to make music. Just so, our various cell types play upon the long, thin keyboard of the genome: they combine notes, playing some genes together as chords, tripping several together in a phrase, gathering bundles of notes to create the complex and wonderful effects that find expression in our biological being. Just as a pianist doesn't play all the piano keys in every piece, only some of the genes get played in the cell types of each organ. Sonata in the Key of Kidney. The Heart Fantasia. Variations on the Theme of Brain.

Beautiful music, all of it. But think what can happen to a piano sonata if an important key on the piano sticks, or sounds the wrong note when struck. Such a flaw will ruin every passage in which that key is played. In some cases, it will destroy the music entirely. In the United States, one child out of every four thousand is born with cystic fibrosis, which is caused by a defective gene on chromosome 7. Children with this particular stuck key have abnormally thick mucus in their lungs, leaving them vulnerable to repeated infections that erode the lungs' tissues and eventually the ability to breathe. Most will die before their thirtieth birthday. In another gene, nothing more than a substitution of a T for an A causes sickle-cell anemia. Huntington's disease, a slow, inescapable meltdown of the brain, occurs because a gene near the top of chromosome 4 contains a series of repeated stutters on the letters CAG, playing them over and over like a scratched recording. The patient goes mad and inevitably dies.

Single-gene alterations account for some three thousand to four thousand other inherited diseases. Hard as these defects are to track down, they are by far the easiest targets for gene hunters. Most diseases, including such common killers as cancer and heart disease, stem from disruptions in the interaction among several genes and between genes and the environment. To find their causes, you have to first know what all the keys on the piano are. You have to know the whole genome. This knowledge will not lead directly to a cure for cancer and other killers, but by 1998 even the scientists who had originally opposed the Human Genome Project as ill conceived and not cost-effective were utterly convinced that its fruit would be well worth the $3 billion investment of taxpayer money. The major pharmaceutical companies were betting that it would lead to new drugs worth a whole lot more.

After leaving the St. Regis, Nicholas Wade tried to reach Francis Collins, the head of the government's genome project, whose official title was director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health. Collins, more or less against his will, was on a plane headed from Newark to Dulles Airport, where he would catch a flight to Los Angeles. He had originally been scheduled to fly straight from Newark to LA, where he was due to give a lecture the next morning. But the evening before, he had gotten a phone call. The mere sound of Venter's voice on the line gave Collins a shiver of apprehension.

"Francis, I think you need to know about something we're about to announce," Venter said. "We have to meet with you right away."

"Who is 'we'?" Collins asked.

"I can't tell you that," Venter replied. "I don't mean to sound coy. I'm just not authorized to talk about it yet."

The two men had known each other for over a decade. When they were first introduced, Craig Venter was an obscure forty-year-old researcher in the National Institute for Neurological Diseases and Stroke, also part of the NIH. He had not attended college until after service in Vietnam, and thus had begun his career in academic science relatively late. Francis Collins was several years younger but well on his way to becoming perhaps the most famous gene hunter in the world. Soon he would claim a share of the credit for the discovery of five disease-related genes, including two of the most important ones yet found, those responsible for cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. In 1994, his success took him to one of the most prominent scientific posts in the country. At the age of forty-three, he was enticed by the secretary of health and human services to leave his large, heavily funded laboratory at the University of Michigan and come to Bethesda, Maryland, to assume leadership of the Human Genome Project, then in its fourth year. The job change meant a cut in pay and much le... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

Shreeve has predecessors in chronicling the intense, venomous competition between an upstart start-up and the U.S. government to sequence the human genome (e.g., Kevin Davies' Cracking the Genome , 2001). However, he holds an advantage over his authorial rivals: a principal in the affair granted Shreeve access to some of his activities. Flamboyant J. Craig Venter was a monumental annoyance to scientific officialdom. Not only did Venter boast he would decode the genome faster than the feds, he also soiled the endeavor's purity by making money from it. The internal workings of the company Venter formed, Celera, supply much of the action in Shreeve's narrative as he develops, for example, differences between the company's moneyman, corporate executive Tony White, and its idea guy, Venter. In case readers have little appetite for office politics, Shreeve delivers commendably clear discourse on techno-molecular obstacles to sequencing DNA, topped with the vivid drama of Celera's mastery of the problems it encountered in doing so. Shreeve's intimate book is a crucial addition to the history of a major scientific fracas. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

The long-awaited story of the science, the business, the politics, the intrigue behind the scenes of the most ferocious competition in the history of modern science—the race to map the human genome.
On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life—seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government’s Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich. Calling his company Celera (from the Latin for “speed”), he assembled a small group of scientists in an empty building in Rockville, Maryland, and set to work.
At the same time, the leaders of the government program, under the direction of Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, began to mobilize an unexpectedly unified effort to beat Venter to the prize—knowledge that had the potential to revolutionize medicine and society.

The stage was set for one of the most thrilling—and important—dramas in the history of science. The Genome War is the definitive account of that drama—the race for the greatest prize biology has had to offer, told by a writer with exclusive access to Venter’s operation from start to finish. It is also the story of how one man’s ambition created a scientific Camelot where, for a moment, it seemed that the competing interests of pure science and commercial profit might be gloriously reconciled—and the national repercussions that resulted when that dream went awry.

From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Though he might be admired for his lofty scientific goals, Venter is not a well-liked man. At the time in question, the government called him "Darth Vader." Shreeve merely describes him both as "an inspiration" and an "opportunistic maniac." Genome War pays close attention to this ego-driven biologist. Despite his facade, he comes across as a complex man with deep insecurities. Shreeve, who gained full access to Celera, handles technical information well and reveals the inner bowels of the company. We see the human genome war exclusively from Celera's battle lines, but this perspective (and Venter's often flat portrayal) barely detract from a compelling story about the search for our genetic make-up. To be continued, for sure, with battle lines possibly redrawn.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

On Charles Darwin's birthday -- February 12 -- in 2001, two groups of scientists announced simultaneously that the human genome sequence had been completed. The public consortium, involving teams from six countries, published its results in Nature and made them immediately available on the Internet. Craig Venter's company, Celera Genomics, published its paper in Science. Those announcements, although premature (only two rough drafts were available, accompanied by some preliminary analyses), marked one of the few uncontroversial moments in the quest for the human genome sequence. Almost everything else, from the ownership of the results to the molecular and statistical methods used, was the subject of sharp conflict. The title of this book, The Genome War, is only partly exaggerated. No casualties were reported, but all the psychological ingredients of a war were present and are documented in the book. The subtitle is a joke, I hope. The Genome War has something in common with Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In Laclos's novel, the apparent goal of the characters -- to seduce a human being -- is little more than a pretext for a cruel game of power. Two centuries later the pretext has become grander -- the goal no longer centers on a single person, but on the DNA of the species -- but the game is no less cruel. Through 26 dense chapters, Shreeve displays for us the intricate game of personalities and ambitions that ultimately led to the completion of the Human Genome Project. Great stories need great characters. Shreeve chose Craig Venter, and in this choice lies the appeal of the book as well as its main limitation. Venter, or at least the Venter whom Shreeve describes, is the herald of glamour, efficiency, and free enterprise. He enters the book onboard his yacht, and from that moment on, any scientist with "home-cut hair" who wears "whatever old sweater and slacks first presented themselves to him on waking up" has a hard time. Big projects, big money, big rewards for the investors; everything related to Venter is formidable, never mind that certain pages of the book are too much reminiscent, for my taste, of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. On the other hand, to offer a suitable stage for such a character, Shreeve continuously has to create dramatic situations. Often he does so by reporting private conversations and very personal thoughts, which in many cases he cannot have learned from the horse's mouth. As a result, the readers simply do not understand what cocktail of fiction and nonfiction they actually have in their hands. More important, crucial aspects of the story and other key figures -- notably John Sulston, the head of genome sequencing at Britain's Sanger Institute -- are left in the shadows. I doubt that the average reader will realize how important it has been to ensure that the human DNA sequence remains freely available to all (despite and against Venter's wishes). Far too few words are spent to explain that Celera could put together its results only by using the data produced and made available to all by the public consortium. In brief, this is not the most balanced or rigorous book on the Human Genome Project. However, some of its pages are worth reading. I liked this image of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: "In the hallways and stairwells hang photographs of the original apostles of the new science: Delbruck himself, Salvador Luria, Crick and Watson, Barbara McClintock, Jacques Monod, Alfred Hershey . . . forever young and cocksure, their eyes bright from the birth of ideas that will take their older, grayer selves to Stockholm." Guido Barbujani
Copyright © 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.