Wondergenes: Genetic Enhancement and the Future of Society

1 An Announcement at the White House

“Nearly two centuries ago, in this room, on this floor, Thomas Jefferson and a trusted aide spread out a magnificent map—a map Jefferson had long prayed he would get to see in his lifetime. The aide was Meriwether Lewis and the map was the product of his courageous expedition across the American frontier, all the way to the Pacific. It was a map that defined the contours and forever expanded the frontiers of our continent and imagination. “Today, the world is joining us here in the East Room to behold a map of even greater significance. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” With these remarks, made before a White House audience on June 26, 2000, President Clinton announced the successful sequencing of the human genome. As he spoke, the president was flanked by two men. One of them, Francis Collins, had inherited in 1984 the mammoth government decoding program, known as the Human Genome Project, An Announcement at the White House 1 6 Wondergenes from JamesWatson, co-discoverer in 1953 of the double-helix shape of the DNA molecule. Since then, Collins had overseen one of the largest non-defense research programs in history. This moment was the crowning achievement of his career. He had already won fame for discovering the gene for cystic fibrosis in 1989 and for collaborating in the discovery of the Huntington disease gene. Now the president of the United States was giving him credit for successfully completing the Human Genome Project, a science project that, more than any other, could revolutionize life as we know it. But Collins had reason to be disgruntled. On the other side of the president stood J. Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics. His company also had sequenced the human genome. But unlike the federal project, which had taken nine years and cost $3 billion, Venter’s company had achieved roughly the same result in less than nine months, at a cost of only $200 million. It was an astonishing achievement by any account, and at the White House, it robbed Collins of center stage. To be sure, Celera had not started its sequencing program from scratch. Other scientists had perfected some of the techniques that Celera had employed, like recombining DNA, and Celera had access to the results of the government project, which publicly posted its newly discovered sequences on the Internet. But Celera had been founded by visionaries, and they employed many clever expedients . Instead of using semi-automated sequencing machines, which required hand loading and unloading, Venter employed fully automated machines developed by a company called PE, which had changed its name from Perkin Elmer after defects in its mirror had crippled the Hubble space telescope. Celera had used a lot of these automated machines, three hundred of them in fact. And they had run them around the clock. The cleverest stratagem of all was the way Celera used computers to analyze the data that the sequencing machines produced. At the time, as noted in the Introduction, Celera was employing the largest non-governmental supercomputing capacity in the world. When Celera first started up, some of the scientists working on the government’s Human Genome Project had been skeptical and disparaging.1 They said that Celera’s “shotgun approach”—another of its innovations, which enabled the order of small fragments of 7 An Announcement at the White House DNA to be determined rapidly—would not work. Celera might be able to decode the DNA sequences, but it would not be able to patch all the fragments back together in the proper order. Celera countered that it would not only reassemble the fragments, but would produce a complete sequence sooner than the government. Francis Collins, as head of the government project, took up the gauntlet. He vowed to complete a “rough draft” of the human genome by 2000 and a final version by 2003, rather than by the original target date of 2005. With this, what had been an intense scientific rivalry became a flat-out horse race. When Venter scoffed that the Human Genome Project would fail to meet this timetable , scientists working on Collins’s project reiterated that Celera would not be able to reassemble its fragments...