From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Mar 18 2002 - 18:18:40 MST
At 10:45 AM 3/18/02 -0800, Hal wrote:
>At most I think people might say that Venter's challenge forced the
>government program to get cracking and solve the problem more quickly.
>The competition forced them to abandon their leisurely schedule and
>produce the results that many years sooner.
Indeed, and Sulston's case (quite detailed in the book, of which my review
was a horribly reduced and abbreviated partial summary) is that the public
project was *not* `leisurely'. Its projected course, which is still not
complete, followed a pattern very familiar to people on this list if
nowhere else: a kind of accelerating curve where a load of difficult
ground-breaking exploratory machine-devising work produced small but
definite gains, which then bootstrapped later work incrementally into rapid
production of well-characterized and mapped sequences. It was always known
that most of the productivity would occur in the last few years, and this
happened pretty much on schedule (or so Sulston argues).
>The characterization of the conflict as being a cross-Atlantic rivalry,
>with the government HGP program as being born out of a British effort,
>in contrast with the "brash Americanism" of Venter, is new to me.
That's not it exactly--more that the US end of the public effort (under
Watson and then Collins) was more ideologically mired than the British end,
which was largely funded (ironically) by the non-government funds of the
Wellcome Trust. But you'll need to read the book for the interesting
details. It will be interesting to read some detailed reply from the
opposed corner.
>The significance of the fact that the HGP published in a British
>journal while Venter published in America was also new.
That's *extremely* interesting; essentially, Sulston's view is that Science
breached its own traditional canons in running the Celera paper, since it
was grotesquely deficient in certain respects (mostly to do with the
inability of referees or other readers to gain access to key but restricted
information; again, the details are in the book). This was not Sulston's
`pique', by the way; Nature would not have accepted the defective US paper.
"Michael Ashburner, the Cambridge Drosophila geneticist, joint head of the
European Bioinformatics Institute and a staunch supporter of unrestricted
data release, wrote an outraged letter to every member of [Science's] board
of reviewing editors, of which he himself had been a member until not long
before. He told them that he was refusing to review any more articles for
Science, or to submit any to the magazine if Science went ahead with the
Celera paper on the existing basis..." The letter circulated widely and was
much discussed, but barely surfaced in the press. Sulston's team had
originally intended to publish in Science, but finally withdrew and took
their work to Nature. The details in the book are quite fascinating,
whether or not one agrees with Sulston's position.
Damien Broderick
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