Hellman's book would put their situation in perspective. After all, no matter what the ultimate outcome of the genome-sequencing contretemps, it s hard to imagine either of them ending up broke or institutionalized. The modern era offers far too many consolation prizes speaking tours, stock options, and, if all else fails, tell-all book contracts. The Kodak moment worked for both Francis Collins and Craig Venter. Even the most heady ideological dispute rarely remains purely intellectual.
Bitter battles arise when two researchers make a discovery then vie for the credit.
Emily Laber is senior editor at The Sciences, the journal of the New York Academy of Sciences. Read science writer Michael Lemonick s profile of the man who challenged the establishment s approach to sequencing the human genome. An online exhibition about two 18th-century Italians, the anatomist Luigi Galvani and the physicist Alessandro Volta, who warred over the role of electricity in living creatures. The academic dispute between Galvani and Volta led to the birth of electrophysiology. Two bitter rivals, Camillo Golgi of Italy and Santiago Ramon y Cajal of Spain, shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system.