September 5, 2007--The DNA Wars

It’s rough out there. Even in the seemingly genteel and objective world of Big Science. Case in point—the bare-knuckles race to decode the human genome.

If you have been following this you might have thought the race was over. That it ended in a sort of draw with the US government-backed National Institute of Health team and the privately-funded team led by Dr. Craig Venter declaring a truce and, in effect, publishing their findings in a gothic version of collaboration. They still hated each other, gossiping and sniping at each other all along the way toward a hoped-for Noble Prize.

But what they published jointly in 2003 was far from the complete genome. It was full of gaps which rendered it less than ideal for use by other scientists who sought to use it for, among other things, medical diagnoses and treatments. So Venter and his rivals lumbered on and just this week Venter announced that he and his team, still privately funded, had filled in virtually all of those missing pieces.

And, to boot they proclaimed, for the first time there is a complete picture of a single person’s DNA (the previous findings, with their gaps, were derived from a sample of DNA from at least four people). And can you believe it, that single individual whose DNA was analyzed was none other than Dr. Venter himself! You can only imagine how crazy this is making the NIH team. But at least they have something to distract themselves from having to contemplate their diminished status—they can rail against Venter, calling him a colossal egomaniac and an assortment of unprintables. Which they are doing as loudly and publicly as they can.

The media is lapping this up. Nothing tweaks them more than a cat fight among the very same people that they on other occasions exalt. They are also focused on those of these new discoveries that more precisely than in the past reveal the genetic differences between all humans (99 rather than the 99.5 percent as previously thought—which should provide solace to racists) and between us and Chimps—about 90 rather than 94 percent, which should be quite a comfort to creationists).

I admit that I enjoy all of these stories, but to me the one that jumps out as most significant is the nature of the competition itself between the public and private efforts. And between establishment science and a scientific maverick. With Venter being the maverick.

The government put billions into their version of the effort while Venter ran around raising just tens of millions for his. The government, with all their money and other resources, set up a lumbering decoding process that was scheduled to grind away for at least a decade. Venter, on the other hand, developed a method that cut many corners, but not quality, and was as a result moving on a much faster track. So what did the NIH, the principal funder, do? One would think that recognizing Venter’s innovations, they would have swung at least some of their resources his way. Instead they did all they could to undermine his efforts and cut off his access to funds over which they had some control—specifically various open competitions for grants that are supposed to be awarded by independent, objective measures. The NIH won that battle but as we now see lost the larger war. (See NY Times story linked below.)

This is sadly not so unusual in science. Venter was not traditionally trained, securing his doctorate later in life than is usual among the science elites—he having first served in Vietnam as a medic, messaging the hearts of hundreds of soldiers dying on MASH operating tables while his rivals were safely tucked away in grad schools. So when he, rough-and-tumble, appeared on the scene he was shunned by the establishment.

We’ve heard this story before—Charles Darwin, a legitimate genius to be sure, was a part of the early 19th century science aristocracy and his findings, though controversial, were more welcome than those of Alfred Russel Wallace’s, a self-taught naturalist, who, before Darwin, came to understand and write about the key mechanism that guides evolution--natural selection.

And in the field of genetics itself, James Watson and Francis Crick got full credit for being the first to describe the double-helix structure of DNA, while failing to acknowledge the essential contributions of Rosalind Franklin who, as a woman without a major institutional affiliation was easy to ignore. (Watson and Crick were at Cambridge; Franklin was at only King’s College London—worlds apart.)

Now Venter is working on decoding Watson’s DNA and plans to present the results to him as a present. He is also working on his mother’s! I can only imagine what that will reveal.