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In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick
discovered the double helix structure of DNA. The discovery
was a profound, Nobel Prize-winning moment in the history
of genetics, but it did not decipher the messages on the
twisted, ladderlike strands within our cells. No one knew
what the human genome sequence actually was. No one had
cracked the code of life. Now, at the beginning of a new
millennium, that code has been cracked.
Kevin Davies, founding editor of the leading
journal in the field, Nature Genetics, has relentlessly
followed the story as it unfolded, week by week, for ten
years. Here for the first time, in rich human, scientific,
and financial detail, is the dramatic story of one of the
greatest scientific feats ever accomplished: the mapping
of the human genome.
In 1990, the U.S. government approved a
15-year, $3 billion plan to launch the Human Genome Project,
whose goal was the sequence the 3 billion letters of human
DNA. At the helm of the project was James Watson, who resigned
after only a couple of years, following a feud with National
Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Bernadine Healy over
gene patenting. His successor was the brilliant young medical
geneticist Francis Collins, who had made his name discovering
the gene for cystic fibrosis. As Davies reports, Collins
is a devout Christian who has traveled to Africa to work
in a missionary hospital. He believes the human genome sequence
is "the language of God." Just as Collins became
project director, J. Craig Venter, a maverick DNA sequencer
and Vietnam veteran, was leaving the NIH to start his own
private research institute. Venter has developed a simple
"shotgun" strategy for sequencing DNA, and his
fame skyrocketed when his new institute proved his sequencing
system worked by becoming the first to sequence the entire
genome of a microorganism.
Only 3 percent of the human genome had been
sequenced by early 1998, the public project's halfway point.
That same year, Venter was approached by PE Corporation
to launch a private human genome project. He stunned the
world when he announced the formation of a new company to
sequence the human genome in a mere three years for $300
million. A war of words broke out between public and private
researchers. Undeterred, Venter built Celera Genomics with
the motto "Speed matters. Discovery can't wait."
and an $80 million supercomputer. While the insults intensified,
Celera's stock price soared, tumbled, and soared again.
Negotiations for cooperation between the public and private
institutes began, only to fall apart in acrimony. Then in
the spring of 2000 President Clinton stopped in, telling
his science advisor to restart negotiations. History was
about to be made.
Davies captures the drama of this momentous
achievement, drawing on his own genetics expertise and interviews
with key scientists including Venter and Collins, as well
as Eric Lander, an MIT computer wizard who refers to the
public genome project as "the forces of good";
Kari Stefansson, the genetics entrepreneur who is remaking
Iceland's economy; and John Sulston, chief of the UK genome
project, who led the charge against gene patenting. Davies
has visited geneticists around the world to illustrate a
vast international enterprise working on the frontier of
human knowledge. Cracking the Genome is the definitive
account of how the code that holds the answers to the origin
of life, the evolution of humanity, and the future of medicine
was broken.
Kevin Davies is the founding editor of
Nature Genetics and coauthor of Breakthrough:
The Race for the Breast Cancer Gene. He graduated from
Oxford University and holds a Ph.D. in genetics from the
University of London. He pursued postdoctoral study at MIT
and Harvard Medical School before joining the editorial
staff of Nature. He is at present Executive Editor
of Current Biology and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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