Human Genome Project: Celera's Race and a Buffalo Donor Called RP11

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Launched in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health with partners in the UK, Japan, France, Germany and China, the Human Genome Project set out over an expected 15 years to read 3.1 billion base pairs of the gene rich human genome. Its hierarchical shotgun method mapped the genome in ordered chunks of about 150,000 base pairs, copied inside bacterial artificial chromosomes. In 1998 former NIH scientist Craig Venter launched Celera Genomics, promising whole genome shotgun sequencing for about 300 million dollars against the public project's 3 billion, and filed preliminary patents on 6,500 genes, while the public side answered with the Bermuda Statement and daily uploads to GenBank.

A March 2000 call by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for unencumbered access wiped 50 billion dollars off biotech stocks in two days, and the race ended in a brokered tie. The finished map of 2003 held only about 19,000 to 22,000 protein coding genes, not the 100,000 expected, and covered only about 92 percent of the genome; the Telomere to Telomere consortium filled the gaps in 2022 and the Y chromosome in August 2023. Then a July 2024 investigation by Undark and STAT reported that about 75 percent of the public reference came from one Buffalo donor, RP11, and about 10 percent from project scientist Pieter de Jong.

• Celera's use of the public GenBank data and the broader work the public project funded
• UC Santa Cruz's July 7, 2000 draft upload and 500 gigabytes downloaded in 24 hours
• Alternative splicing, which lets over 90 percent of human genes make more than one protein
• The ELSI ethics program, 5 percent of the budget, and its role in the groundwork for HIPAA
• Venter's admission that his own DNA was one of Celera's five samples