The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried To Capture The Code Of Life And Save The World

2005 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition Copyright © 2004 by James Shreeve All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from Faust, Part 1 by Goethe, edited by David Luke (OWC, 1987). . Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shreeve, James. The genome war: how Craig Venter tried to capture the code of life and save the world / James Shreeve. p. cm. 1. Human Genome Project. 2. Venter, J. Craig. I. Title. QH431.S5577 2004 611’.01816—dc21 2003047580 www.ballantinebooks.com www.randomhouse.com eISBN: 978-0-307-41706-0 v3.0_r2 Table of Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue Part One Chapter 1 - May 1998: “You can do Mouse” Chapter 2 - The Secret of Life Chapter 3 - Down Bungtown Road Chapter 4 - Genesis Chapter 5 - The Code Breaker Chapter 6 - This Guy can get Sequencers to Work Chapter 7 - The Quieter World Chapter 8 - H Flu Part Two Chapter 9 - A Hundred Million Customers Chapter 10 - The Gene Hunter Chapter 11 - All Hands Chapter 12 - Dead on Arrival Chapter 13 - Venter Units Chapter 14 - War Chapter 15 - The Ides of March Chapter 16 - He Doesn’t Get it Chapter 17 - The Hand of Man Chapter 18 - Evil Boy Chapter 19 - Chess Games Chapter 20 - How to Assemble a Fly Abcd Fghij Lmn Pqrst Vw Yz. Chapter 21 - Line 678 Chapter 22 - Dancing in Miami Part Three Chapter 23 - Getting to no Chapter 24 - Things Being what they Are Chapter 25 - A Garden Party Chapter 26 - End Game Epilogue - A Beautiful Moment A Note on Sources Notes Acknowledgments About the Author Also by James Shreeve To Walton Shreeve and Phyllis Heidenreich Shreeve (1922–2000) Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält I’ll learn what holds the world together There, at its inmost core. — GOETHE, Faust PROLOGUE On the morning of June 26, 2000, a short, elderly man walked up the pedestrian lane along the east side of the White House grounds and joined a couple of dozen people already gathered outside the guest entrance, under the shade of the willow oak trees that line the lane. It was the beginning of a sultry Washington day, one of the rare ones in that mild summer, and the man’s shirt was already damp from perspiration. “That I should live to see this day is beyond belief,” he said, to no one in particular. “I was there in the beginning, you know. I was there before DNA.” Norton Zinder, professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, had been a molecular biologist since before 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick made the essential discovery that the shape of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule, or DNA, enabled life to happen. He had made some important contributions back then, too, and much later, in the late 1980s, he had helped Watson organize a government science program called the Human Genome Project. Its goal was to reveal the innermost secret of life: the entire code, spelled out in the language of DNA, for the construction and maintenance of a human being. Like the others waiting in the shade, he had been invited to attend the president’s announcement that the human genome had at last been deciphered. Zinder’s gratitude for having lived until this June day was not entirely rhetorical. He had recently suffered a stroke. While he was recovering, he had tried to mediate a globally watched conflict that had very nearly turned the Huma