It's been 20 years since the human genome was sequenced, but Craig Venter is still not on board with the participation trophy.
He provided me with a history lesson from that era, explaining that the White House announcement on June 26, 2000, was based on when Celera finished the mathematical assembly of its genome. To provide affirmation of his account Venter noted, as he has in previous interviews, that the late John Sulston stated in his bookthat the government-funded project was “a bunch of phonies” when they went to the white house as they didn’t have any real data yet.
And in a moment of reflection, I saw some statesmanship come out in Venter. “Look, our goal was not to damage NIH or anything. President Clinton was a friend, and a good mutual friend is the one who convinced him that he had to step in and do something.” Venter said. He ended with a final thought on the retrospective he told me, saying, “So that's why we celebrate the actual White House announcement and the first publications, which are the true first versions of the human genome.
“The calculation took weeks and weeks to run on this huge, like one-and-a-half teraflop computer, and we had no idea whether we had a Drosophila genome or not until the day before the meeting,” Venter continued. As it turns out, the calculations worked, and the Celera team quickly made about 500 CDs with the sequence on them. “We distributed the CDs to all the Drosophila scientists at the meeting. We put one on everybody's seat,” Venter reminisced with a smile.
“Until this giant calculation ran and ran and ran for weeks, we had no idea whether we had a human genome or not,” Venter stated. “And I would get calls from the White House every day, you know, is it soup yet? Is it done? They were getting very nervous because they had to pick a date and schedule everything with all the dignitaries and people coming. And so, they were getting very nervous at the last minute.
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