BOOK REVIEW
Venal Combat
Paul Rabinow
The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of
Life and Save the World. James Shreeve. x + 403 pp. Knopf,
2004. $26.95.
The completion of the sequencing of the human genome was by any
standard a technological triumph and a scientific landmark. It was
widely publicized as a "race," although exactly what it
meant to complete the task was never made very clear. But the race
turned out to be, in a sense, rigged: Ultimately, political
intervention at the highest levels ensured that the competitors
would cross the finish line together, allowing President Clinton and
Prime Minister Blair to come together at the Rose Garden in June
2000 to celebrate the achievement.
Who were the competitors in this supposed contest? There were two: A
public consortium—which grouped the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), the Department of Energy, multiple university
laboratories receiving federal grants to carry out the sequencing
work, the world's largest philanthropy (the Wellcome Trust in
Britain) and smaller publicly funded genome projects from the United
Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany and China—was pitted against
Celera Genomics, a biotech company in Rockville, Maryland.
Francis Collins, codiscoverer of "the cystic fibrosis
gene" (for which he shared a patent), represented the public
effort as director of the NIH Human Genome Project. Craig Venter, an
outspoken maverick and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics,
represented the private endeavor. He had previously worked for the
NIH and while he was there had made his name (and many enemies) by
attempting to patent stretches of DNA known as expressed sequence
tags, even though their biological function was unknown—an
effort many considered scandalous.
Leaders of both the public project and Celera portrayed the attempt
to sequence the human genome in epic terms. Addressing scientists
assembled at the mecca of molecular biology, Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory, Collins said, "I hope this doesn't sound corny or
grandiose, but I feel this . . . is the most important scientific
effort that humankind has ever mounted." Sir John Sulston, head
of the British project, called the achievement of one milestone
along the way (the deciphering of chromosome 22) "as important
an accomplishment as discovering that the Earth goes round the Sun
or that we are descended from apes." Venter also engaged in
hyperbole, albeit of a more modest nature, when he said, "We're
going to establish a new paradigm. We're going to prove you can do
open research and make money at the same time." Each of the
three men craved publicity and was relentlessly competitive: Venter
reveled in his bad-boy reputation, Collins consistently promoted
himself as "selfless," and Sulston seemed convinced that
he had been designated (I suppose by the Goddess of Reason) to
defend humanity.
James Shreeve, a science journalist, has written a riveting account
of the two parallel campaigns to sequence the human genome. He gives
us an extraordinary blow-by-blow narrative of how the technological
and moral battles were staged and fought. Shreeve had untrammeled
access to Celera during the whole course of the events. Yet,
strangely, he had much less access to the public project, whose
representatives not only politely refused to let him observe their
meetings but also blocked significant portions of the public record
that Shreeve sought access to through a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request. This fact, which comes only at the end of the book,
in a "Note on Sources," is a shock. Shreeve dryly observes that
I was told by the head of NIH's FOIA office that they were
permitted to deny access under Exemption 4 to the FOIA, which
prevents the release of "commercial and financial information
that is privileged and confidential." Considering the concerted
efforts the HGP leaders made during the race to distinguish their
totally free, totally public version of the genome from Celera's
commercial one, the explanation sounds oddly discordant.
The Genome War should be read by all who are concerned
about the conditions under which science is practiced today. For
balance, readers may also want to consult some of the accounts
defending the public side. John Sulston has written one (with
Georgina Ferry) that tells the story from his
perspective—The Common Thread: A Story of Science,
Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome [reviewed in the
May–June 2003 issue: http://www.americanscientist.org/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/18850].
By the end of The Genome War, the reader will have
abandoned any illusions that this was a combat between knights in
white armor. The duel to achieve a technological goal was
accompanied by a rhetoric of moral combat marked by ferocity and
fueled by righteousness and ego.
At a Congressional hearing, Collins made this remark:
Many in the scientific community are concerned about a
circumstance where large amounts of this critical information might,
in some way, be constrained from utilization by everybody who wants
to use it. It is such basic information, and the notion
that it would, in some way, be moving out of a public domain
enterprise into a single private company has raised some cautions in
the minds of many of my advisors.
Although the emphasis is on "basic," it probably should
have been on "single," because as Shreeve documents, the
public project was involved in relations with commercial firms
well-known for their aggressive patenting. So despite the
participants' rhetoric of moral purity, the personal battles were,
above all, about credit, personal credit—as the book recounts
at length.
Among the many virtues of The Genome War is its adept
chronicling of complex alliances and the strains on them. On the
Celera side, the differences (sometimes minor and sometimes major)
between the idiosyncratic and provocative Craig Venter and his boss,
the no-nonsense businessman Tony White, are clearly set out.
Venter's commitment to make the genomic data available—with a
delay—came into increasing tension with White's business
strategy. This conflict was exacerbated by the tactics of the public
project, which constantly painted the staff of Celera as betrayers
of mankind and incompetent scientists whose sequencing strategy
would never work. James Watson was fond of referring to Venter as
"Hitler," and Sulston told Science that Celera
was involved in a "con job."
The tension between the camps and even within them was also
heightened by the (little known) fact that, while providing a steady
stream of righteous moralism to its academic troops and the media,
the public project had contracted with the California biotech
company Incyte Pharmaceuticals, which was all the while busy
patenting genomic information and selling it to a handful of major
pharmaceutical companies. In fact, Incyte was a better example of
the dangers of mixing commerce and science than was Celera. Incyte
had been one of the pioneers in patenting DNA fragments in an
aggressive manner and then marketing them at high prices to
pharmaceutical companies. Celera's business plan was never as
exclusionary and was based on better-substantiated claims to having
identified functional sequences.
In 1999, Incyte CEO Randy Scott claimed the company had hard
evidence that the human genome was made up of 140,000 genes, whereas
most researchers believed the figure was about 100,000 genes. One of
the many things learned from the sequencing is that humans actually
have a far smaller number of genes, perhaps as few as 26,000
(although these may encode a much larger number of proteins).
There is an almost Shakespearean quality to the narrative (which may
also bring The Sopranos to mind). We see Shreeve portray
Collins and his allies as relentlessly performing their
sanctimonious Boy Scout cheerleading in public in passages like these:
The Human Genome Project, Collins told himself, was about
community, about the rules that applied to all, about the sacrifice
of individual motives for the collective good. It was even a bit
about God. . . .
"If you drew a circle around what God
knows, it would be unimaginably huge," [Collins] later said.
"What I know is a teeny, teeny dot within the circle. But every
once in a while we humans get to sneak out of the little dot and
find something that wasn't known before. That's the way it was with
the cystic fibrosis gene. I felt I was getting a tiny glimpse into
God's mind."
Shreeve describes at great length evidence that Collins and his
loyalists, while defending Humanity, God and Science, simultaneously
engaged behind the scenes in politics most venal: Specifically,
Shreeve alleges that they threatened journalists and distinguished
scientists, stooped to vulgar name-calling, reneged on agreements
and refused compromises proposed by other government officials.
The book paints a portrait of Venter that is more nuanced and
complicated than the one that his opponents and other journalists
have given us. The aggressive, competitive, driven and blunt
dimensions of Venter's character are well-known, and Shreeve
provides numerous vivid examples of this side of the man's persona.
He also presents other facets of Venter's personality, and of the
internal dynamics of the company, which fill out and complicate the
picture. We meet Venter the scientist, who finds himself in
increasing disagreement and eventual fierce combat with Tony White.
Venter is humiliated on a number of occasions and thwarted on
others. Shreeve witnessed the frustration in Venter's relations with
other business allies. He also saw Venter chafing at the bit when
company lawyers placed constraints on him as Celera moved toward a
public offering. To Shreeve's credit, he gives us enough of a sense
of the man to overcome easy moral judgments, and enough information
to decide ourselves whether to applaud or condemn the whole
enterprise. That complexity is one of the book's strengths.
Although early sections of the book fall into an overwritten,
breathless style, once the narrative pace picks up, Shreeve is
masterful at keeping the chronicle in constant motion while
providing sufficient explanation for the reader to grasp the
technological challenges and scientific import of events. He also
explains the science behind the sequencing in plain English. Shreeve
presents the moral and political events in all their rawness. The
reader comes away informed—if shaken.