BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Time Out! Human genome hype rivals Y2K

April 10, 2000 7:00 AM UTC

While the human genome project was initially considered by many to be a waste of government money, the subsequent excitement over the potential drugs and diagnostics to come out of the effort has silenced its critics. Indeed, the passion and controversy over the sequencing project now focuses on the ability of companies such as Celera Genomics Group and Incyte Genomics Inc. to sequence human genes faster and more completely than the public consortium.

CRA (Rockville, Md.) captured the headlines last week by announcing that it has completed the 3.18 billion base pair sequence of a single human genome using a whole-genome shotgun approach and access to the public consortium's data. Assembly and annotation of the sequence is expected to take only one to two months, at which time CRA said it will make its data public. ...