The Sequence
Inside the Race for the Human Genome
Kevin Davies
Penguin
310 pages/Rs 295
Nothing puts off the human race more than two broad suggestions. One is that they might not be alone in the universe, namely, the extra-terrestrial intelligence argument. The other is the possibility that they can be reproduced without the benefit of the usual accompanying pleasures. Of the two, though, as the recent moral angst over human cloning shows, it is probably the latter that upsets people more. God, they seem to think, is freer to do his thing outside the solar system than inside it.
This book, which is ideal for a 3-hour plane journey, has to be read in that general background. Kevin Davies is well qualified to attempt such a book. He has a Ph D in genetics, has done post-doctoral work at MIT and Harvard and was the founding editor of Nature Genetics.
Given the speed with which the whole DNA-cloning debate has proceeded after the Dolly episode in 1996, this is a very timely book. As the title suggests, it traces the course of the pursuit for unraveling the human genome. In doing so, it provides some fascinating insights into how these projects work.
Racily written, it provides a very entertaining and accessible account of the competition between the governments of the US and the UK, on the one hand, and a private sector firm, on the other, to be first to unscramble the Code.
Ever since Watson and Crick figured out the DNA chain, a muted debate had been going on in scientific circles whether the human DNA could be sequenced. Given that it has 3 billion letters, not only did the task seem essentially unachievable, the cost also seemed wholly prohibitive.
However, the idea gained some momentum in the 1980s and in 1990, the governments of the US and the UK decided to set up a joint project which was to run till 2005. As is normal with anything that governments do, the project soon became unwieldy and seemed to be going nowhere.
Meanwhile, an American entrepreneur called J Craig Venter had decided that if he could get there first and patent what he found, he could make a very substantial profit from the pharmaceutical companies. So in 1998 he also entered the race with his firm Celera Genomics.
To help him along, he decided to use high-powered sequencing computers. He believed that he could finish the whole thing off in just three years. Remarkably, that is exactly what he did.
Francis Collins was now running the government project. He had been given two very clear objectives. One was to get the project back on track so that it could keep pace with Venter; the other was to release DNA data every night so that the human genome could become unpatentable.
The race was marked with the usual acrimony and trading of insults. For two years, the two sides tried to go one-up in the public perception until, in the summer of 2000, they suddenly decided to behave in a more civilised fashion.
On June 26 that year, Collins and Venter flanked Bill Clinton at a White House ceremony where the US president declared that mankind had begun
