On March 14, US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair released a joint statement exhorting industry to make public “raw, fundamental data on the human genome, including the human DNA sequence.“ Confusing White House statements and mistaken reporting led to the belief that new gene patent rules were at hand. In an afternoon briefing, Francis Collins, director of the human genome project, said the statement did not intend any change in patenting rules. But he did say that “from the NIH perspective” data from cDNA libraries was considered “raw” data to be made public, thus perhaps implying DNA microarrays—which can yield the same sort of data—would also be affected. However, a later clarification excluded data from microarrays. The day's events lead to a dramatic drop in biotech stocks, with genomics companies hardest hit: Share price of Incyte Pharmaceuticals fell $53 (27%) to close the day at $143.5, while Millennium Pharmaceuticals dropped 25% to $176, Celera 21% to $149.25, and Affymetrix 14.4% to $203.

The US-UK statement came one week after leaders of the not-for-profit, public-private consortium of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD) and the Wellcome Trust (London) declared they were at loggerheads with Craig Venter, president of Celera, whose for-profit genome sequencing enterprise is following different strategies for completing sequencing and distributing its findings. The two parties had flirted with cooperating to pool their data, but talks collapsed when the consortium released a private letter outlining the difficulties in negotiating with Celera, which subsequently publicly accused the consortium of using pressure tactics. However, this left human genome matters much as they were, with the consortium promising to distribute all its sequence data rapidly and freely to the entire scientific community, and Celera planning to charge subscriber fees to some market segments and insisting on blocking potential competitors from reselling data that it considers proprietary.

Celera responsed to Clinton and Blair's statement, saying its “own mission is completely consistent with the goals of assuring that the world's researchers have access to this important information.”