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When Michael Morgan, programme director of genetics at Britain's Wellcome Trust, addressed a genomics meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, last Friday (15 May) on the trust's plans for supporting human sequencing efforts, he received almost a standing ovation from the researchers present.

Morgan explained a decision by the trust the previous weekend to more than double its commitment to the Human Genome Project, bringing its total investment to £205 million (US$340 million).

The extra money will allow the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, England, which is jointly run with the UK Medical Research Council, to undertake the sequencing of one-third of the complete genome; the trust had previously been committed to financing one-sixth.

But the trust has indicated that it is prepared to go even further. Morgan said it intends to open discussions with existing members of the project — most of whom are based in the United States — under which up to half of the genome could be sequenced in Britain.

Although Wellcome's decision to increase funding was taken independently of a privately funded sequencing initiative by J. Craig Venter and Perkin-Elmer (see above), its announcement is said to have been brought forward to provide a riposte to some of the claims being made by the latter.

Even more than the vote of confidence in the genome project that the trust's decision represents, it was Morgan's statement of the firm position the trust is taking on the question of access to sequencing data that brought the researchers to their feet.

“What Wellcome has done is fabulous,” says Richard Gibbs of the Baylor University College of Medicine, a co-organizer of the Cold Spring Harbor meeting. “The warm reaction to Morgan's presentation reflected the impassioned feeling among those present that the data needs to be freely and publicly available.”

Most of those at the meeting are involved in publicly funded sequencing efforts. Surveys have revealed deep-rooted concern in this community about the impact of the encroachment of patent claims on genetic sequences (see Nature 392, 325; 1998). So their support for Wellcome's position came as little surprise.

This support extended to Morgan's announcement that the trust is not only conducting an urgent review of the credibility and scope of patents based solely on DNA sequences but is also prepared, where appropriate, to challenge such patents.

Wellcome's initiative appears to have helped to restore confidence in the public sequencing effort at a critical time. Morgan admits that this has been part of his goal, pointing to a similar catalytic effect which he claims the trust was able to exercise on European-wide efforts to sequence the yeast genome.