Sequencing the human genome is a hard act to follow, and the two men who spearheaded the sequencing effort have taken different paths in the aftermath of that revolutionary biological project, just as they did to achieve the first draft of the genome in 2001. Britain's John Sulston, one of the leaders of the public sequencing consortium, has returned to basic research, and last month shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine for his early developmental biology work on the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. Craig Venter, the American who used his own DNA in the privately funded arm of the sequencing effort, plans to burn individual human genomes onto compact discs at a price tag of $500,000 each.
Sulston: Nobel reward for humble worm
Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library
Venter eventually hopes that CD genomes will be mass produced, and predicts that they will ultimately be stored in physicians' offices along with individual medical data, much as paper or computer records are catalogued today. Such CDs could be handed down from one generation to another within families, making genetic information valuable in future years for predicting and recognizing familial disease trends.
Aside from its cost, Venter's latest commercial venture faces practical challenges. The three gigabytes of computer space required to store a genome fits onto a small hard drive, and the three billion DNA base pairs must somehow be squeezed onto a CD. And as bioethicist Arthur Caplan articulates, "I don't think it makes any sense at all to have one's genome mapped right now. There's not enough practical utility in having a map—not much can be done diagnostically, and even less therapeutically. Paying $500,000 now is like being first on your block to own a $25,000 high-definition TV when there are almost no transmitters broadcasting high-definition TV [signals] yet."
But Venter is not alone in trying to produce genomes on CD. At least three other companies, including the United Kingdom's Solexa, are working on similar projects. However, he claims his motives are not commercial. Venter was chairman of the Maryland-based company, Celera, that carried out the private effort to decode the human genome. He was ousted from the company in January 2002 when it switched business directions from bioinformatics to drug discovery and development. He now runs several nonprofit ventures focusing on genetic bioethical concerns and on finding energy alternatives that produce lower gas emissions. He says that profit from the CD genomes will fund these projects.
Meanwhile, Sulston shares the 2002 Nobel Prize with Sydney Brenner, president of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, and Robert Hovitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brenner established C. elegans as an experimental model for the genetic analysis of organ development; Sulston described the phenomena of cell lineage and apoptosis and their importance in whole-body development; and Horvitz identified the first cell death genes, ced-3, ced-4 and ced-9, and their human homologues.
