The two teams in the fiercely contested race agreed last year to a draw and a truce by announcing in June at a White House ceremony that each had decoded the human genome and by publishing their results at the same time, in rival scientific journals, this February. But in a series of e-mail messages from February onward, and in a public lecture at Harvard last month, Eric Lander, one of the three principal members of the consortium, has derided the shotgun method championed by J. Craig Venter, Celera's president. Lander is director of the Whitehead Institute, Boston. The consortium's other two leaders, John E. Sulston of the Sanger Center in England and Robert Waterston of Washington University, St Louis, pioneered the consortium's method for decoding the genome. Celera did not independently produce a sequence of the genome at all.
Venter is no less blunt.
The dispute is the latest in a series of increasingly bitter disagreements between the university biologists who are part of the consortium and Venter, who is a player in both the academic and commercial worlds. The consortium has made its genome sequence free to everyone, denouncing Celera as a commercial operation that will not produce a perfectly finished genome. Celera says its version is better and its subscription cost affordable. In earlier spats, consortium scientists accused Venter of a breach of scientific ethics when he announced he would make use of their publicly posted genomic data in completing his version of the human genome. They also tried to prevent Science magazine from publishing Celera's article about the human genome by objecting to Celera's requirements for protecting its data against resale by others.