Sir

I would like to set the record straight about my closing statement at the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing on the Human Genome Project (Nature 404, 691; 2000).

Your reporter wrote that I said “Government's role is to initiate research on which private sector companies can capitalize, pointing to Celera Genomics as a prime example” and that I “endorsed the way that Celera is incorporating the public Human Genome Project's data into its own database, adding its own sequence information, providing annotation tools, then selling it”.

This is a misleading interpretation of my views, and of comments that I made to your reporter and during the hearing (see http://www.house.gov/science/106_hearing.htm#energy_and_environment ). What I sought to express is an optimistic view of the benefits of federal research, including technology transfer to the private sector.

In closing, I noted the role of the US federal government in settling the American West and in the development of the Internet. I said “Think what would have happened if the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had stepped forward and insisted that the public interest could not be served unless it controlled the content and rate of growth of the Internet. Dr Venter and others are responsible for speeding up the sequencing of the human genome by five years. For this reason at least, I would rather have the problems of private-sector involvement in the human genome field than not. Some problems are good to have, and I think this is one of them.”