Celera declares the sequencing race irrelevant

The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and its collaborators have been armed with more than $80 million to race through the rest of the human genome sequencing project. But Celera Genomics Corp., which in 1998 probably instigated the arms race in the sequencing project by promising to complete the job by itself by 2001, says its investment is going to result instead in a vast computational capacity that will allow its partners to digest and synthesize the data sequenced both through its efforts and that of the publicly funded sequencing centers.

Indeed, Celera now says it doesn't matter who completes the genome sequence first...