“Decoding the Human Genome”
J. Craig Venter, Ph.D.
President, CSO
Celera Genomics
Present at the Creation III
Remarks by Jeffrey H. Lynford
Second Annual Lynford Lecture
October 13, 1999
Public Advocate Green, President Chang, Drs. Venter and Fraser, Professors Chudnovsky, Trustees, Faculty and Fellow Students: It has become an annual custom at these IMAS convocations that I am permitted to make a few observations to put our efforts in a larger context.
I want to thank the Honorable Mr. Green for helping us welcome our guest speaker and his colleague to New York City and particularly the Borough of Brooklyn. The Public Advocate has worked tirelessly on behalf of all New Yorkers for many years. His efforts have improved the lives of all of us who live, work or study in this large and diverse city. Thank you, Mark.
In September 1997, when I made my first remarks to open an IMAS gathering, I utilized the title of Freeman Dyson's memoir, Infinite In Both Directions, to describe the continuum over which IMAS would conduct its explorations and academic research. A year later, in September 1998, we had with us Professor Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He spoke to us on the progress of his work to forge a unified cosmology; to define how the very strongest and weakest forces in the Universe have evolved and may fit together. Today we travel in another direction, to understand how each individual in this room may have evolved and ultimately how he or she may fit together.
As you know, the activities of IMAS are led by its Directors, Professors David and Gregory Chudnovsky. Their work in theoretical, computational and applied mathematics, as well as their research and development projects in computer hardware, provide valuable tools for all who work along the aforementioned band of human inquiry. This past year their work has included research on hypergeometric functions, data visualization, and pulse width modulations. It is anticipated that the work on hypergeometric functions will be published by Springer, and prior to that, will be available as IMAS preprints.
When IMAS was formed at Polytechnic we decided that annually, in the Fall, we would invite a leading researcher or practitioner to talk with us about his or her latest efforts. Dr. J. Craig Venter's lecture here today continues the tradition of inviting the best and the brightest to share with us the latest developments related to his groundbreaking work. As President and Chief Scientific Officer of Celera Genomics Group he is leading his firm in an international race to map the complete human genome. The competition is strong and the stakes are high. This international competition includes not only other public companies, but also foundations and governments. Through the derivation of the most sophisticated algorithms and their application to computer software and hardware, mapping the human genome has become a feat, which previously was thought unachievable. To many scientists, finding the precise sequence of the three billion letters in the human genetic code is equivalent to discovering the Holy Grail of biology.
This race is not only riveting, but also fraught with complex issues. The information and life sciences are converging into a single teclmological and economic force. Even Jeremy Rifkin, the most vocal critic of genetic engineering, has acknowledged, "The marriage of computers and genes forever alters our reality at the deepest levels of human experience."
The stakes have expanded almost exponentially since Francis Crick and James Watson did their work on the "double helix" at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. Then, they were competing against mere mortals, Professors Maurice Wilkins and Linus Pauling of Kings College and Cal Tech, respectively. The pressure to unlock the DNA puzzle was, to a great extent, self-imposed.
The ultimate reward for these researchers, closeted in their laboratories, was peer recognition.
Today the pressures on leaders such as Dr. Venter are much more intense. All their work is undertaken under the glare of public scrutiny. Scholarly and personal motivations have been augmented by the impersonal, but very quantifiable, calculations relating to returns on invested capital.
By my rough estimate, the combined market capitalization of just the four U.S. publicly traded corporations, including Celera, organized to compete for a share of the genome pie, is $5 billion. This number increases significantly if the capital committed by pharmaceutical companies, who have lined up to utilize the fruits of this research, through joint venture and licensing agreements, is added.
Beyond investors' expectations, there are the employees and their families whose livelihoods depend upon the success of their corporate employers' efforts. These pressures exert a force greater than the concerns incorporated in the old maxim "publish or perish."
Apart from the issue of commercial profit and loss, loom the legal and moral questions, which extend beyond the boundaries of this forum. For example, will foreign sovereign nations respect the jurisdiction of the United States Patent Office, if the intellectual property to be protected is perceived by them as important as, let's say, nuclear fission? To my knowledge, there have been no patents issued for nuclear weapons. Then, there is the accompanying question, asked by many of the participants in the Manhattan Project, after its initial success at Alamogordo: "What price glory?" Are we trespassing into the realm reserved for a higher or divine power? These and similar questions have been asked before and have no immediate answer. Certainly they will linger on, for us to
contemplate for as long as there are insoluble questions to ponder.
In conclusion, thank you, Dr. Venter, for sharing with us your thoughts and accomplishments
to date. Your appearance here today not only serves to reinforce our efforts at IMAS, but also may act as a catalyst for students in this very audience to follow in your historic footsteps into the next millennium.