As scientists we should look past all this, but that's hard with the media recognizing that this is a cheap and easy way for science writers to get their story on the front page. People are very susceptible to that. Apparently, Celera and the Human Genome Project are still negotiating a joint publication of the genome data. Oh, I talk to everybody in the community. This is a public service project and I think it would serve the world well for everyone to be talking.
Progress is made much more quickly.
That has always been the case in science. This is not like the transcontinental railroad, where at some point someone is going to nail in the golden spike, and then and only then can you go cross-country. There is no golden nucleotide to be nailed into the double helix at the end. What's important is that every bit of the DNA railroad is already being used today. As of this month, more than 85 percent of the human genome is freely available on the Web.