As Nature Biotechnology goes to press, the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics are preparing to announce completion of a working draft of the sequence of the human genome. Unfortunately, this biotechnology milestone will have been achieved for the most part in an atmosphere of mutual hostility and suspicion rather than as a desirable collaborative effort between the public and private sectors. This is particularly disappointing, since the collaboration between J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics and Gerald Rubin at the University of California at Berkeley proved that the two sectors can work fruitfully together (we couldn't resist), yielding the sequence of Drosophila in only a few months.

Celera's initial announcement describing plans to sequence the human genome by 2001—four years earlier than the target proposed for the Human Genome Project—was an anathema to the HGP, and one suspects that the decision to announce this plan at the 1998 Cold Spring Harbor conference, where many of the heads of the public sequencing centers were meeting, was timed for maximum effect. The suggestion that genome sequencers might want to give up sequencing the human genome, leave it to Celera, and instead concentrate on the mouse genome implies that Venter and his associates believed the human genome sequence was there for the taking and that the HGP was at a truly low ebb.

But the public project was in no mood to capitulate. Venter's challenge to the research community instead provoked a new sense of urgency and reality. In the UK, the Wellcome Trust responded by nearly doubling its funding of genome sequencing at the Sanger Center and, in the US, $81.6 million of new funding was allocated to a core group of five major centers in March 1999. In the subsequent months, sequencing was ramped up significantly to a turnover of 12,000 bases every minute. In November, the billionth base of the genome was deposited in GenBank; four months later, the two-billionth base was lodged. (It was a T, by the way.)

Today, Venter and the leaders of the HGP remain extremely wary of one another. Although attempts to find common ground for collaboration have been made—in December 1999 with the Department of Energy, and again in March of this year—these have foundered until now because of Celera's demands for control over access to the sequence data and intention to patent certain genes.

With the completion of the “first draft of the genome,” it is now high time that private and public initiatives find a way to resolve their differences and collaborate together on the next stage of the project—producing the final draft. Some observers have suggested that the common pooling of resources could allow its completion by early next year. The conciliatory statements by HGP Director Francis Collins and Venter last month on joint publication suggest that relations are becoming more cordial. We hope so. There is too much at stake for petty rivalry, politics, or even money to distract us from addressing the real question of what all this sequence means.