Walter Gratzer
Science Red in Tooth and Claw
A Life Decoded: My Genome - My Life
By J Craig Venter (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 390pp £25)

'Many enemies, much honour', Sigmund Freud thought. It is an opinion that Craig Venter undoubtedly shares, for he quotes with relish a remark once addressed to him by a government functionary: 'This is Washington, and we judge people by the quality of their enemies, and son, you have some of the best.' The grand plan to assemble a complete read-out of the DNA that makes up the human genome - the set of instructions, three billion letters long, that determine our species' form and function - was billed as the greatest intellectual achievement in man's history. In truth it was no such thing. The incomparable Sydney Brenner found the assertion 'simply ridiculous'. It was, he said, 'an entrepreneurial accomplishment, a great managerial achievement, but there isn't any new science in it'. That had been done years before in Cambridge by Fred Sanger, who created the methods for revealing a DNA sequence (the succession of letters in the text), and had decoded the genome of a virus (tiny compared to that of a man, mouse or fruit-fly), at a paltry cost in manpower and resources. For this he had been rewarded with his second Nobel Prize.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was not universally welcomed. Some scientists opposed it on the grounds that it was otiose, for it was already known that the genes occupy only about 5 per cent of the genome, and the rest was variously described as garbage or junk (not garbage though, said Sydney Brenner, because garbage is what you throw away). Others felt, with good reason, that the sheer profligacy of the undertaking, which in the end consumed $3 billion of public money, would drain funds from other, more deserving biomedical research. But the beguiling vision caught the imagination of funding agencies in half a dozen countries, of influential scientific panjandrums, and especially of politicians on the lookout for a grand projet (even if the elder President Bush referred to it as the Human Gnome Initiative). And indeed, as the cheerleaders for the project, notably Jim Watson, one of the discoverers of the DNA structure, foresaw, a vast amount of information would flow from it, about human evolution and development, and above all about the origins of diseases.

Might, at all events, prevailed, and the project was launched. The effort was to be divided between thirty-five centres around the world, though with heavy bias towards the US. But it was not long before the participants, and the mandarins who controlled the funding, were quarrelling about the division of the spoils. Soon thirty of the thirty-five laboratories were squeezed out. Watson resigned as director, and was replaced by Francis Collins. Into this midden by then had stepped a brash and assertive outsider: Craig Venter was loudly proclaiming to all who would listen that the sequencing strategy agreed by the participants in the HGP was misguided, and would waste both years and treasure. He, Venter, was raising private capital, and would guarantee to do the job in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. But to satisfy his commercial backers, some at least of the genes that he discovered would have to be made available for patenting by pharmaceutical companies before their sequences could be released. By contrast, the public programme was already making all sequence data available as they emerged, for the human genome was the property - was it not? - of the whole human race. Venter's irruption provoked a furore; he was denounced as a greedy arriviste, likened by Watson to Hitler, and (even worse) dismissed as a charlatan.

The story of the human genome adventure has been well told in books by science journalists and less so by certain of the protagonists in the public programme; and here now is Craig Venter, offering his perspective. You do not need to get far into the narrative to divine why its author has attracted so much foaming obloquy from so many seemingly equable people. He does not project a cuddly persona, nor is he troubled by self-doubt. He recounts his successes (many and great) and his failures (few and small) with exuberance. He has excelled, it seems, at everything he set his mind to. In high school he was a champion swimmer with Olympic aspirations (his coach assured him that he 'had more guts than anyone he had ever known'); he was a fearless surfer, scorning the attentions of man-eating sharks and poisonous sea-snakes; he designed and built boats, and all his life he has enjoyed pitting himself against the ferocity of the elements, while his crewmen cower below, losing control of their bladders; and he was also, it appears, irresistible to women. A formative experience was his service in the medical corps in Vietnam, where he became a virtuoso of the biopsy needle, escaped punishment by court martial for insubordination not once but twice, and did not flinch when marines shot at him with heavy machine guns for sport as he exercised on the beach. Returning home, he entered university, led student demonstrations and proceeded smoothly to a PhD under a noted biochemist. Achievement followed achievement: 'I had published more papers in quality journals in my first year than most doctoral students managed in five.'

Venter was directing his own research group at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) near Washington when he made the decision to go where glamour lay - into DNA. The strategy with which he proposed to eclipse the mighty HGP was not as original as he makes out. The idea had occurred to many others, and had been rejected on what seemed reasonable grounds. But Venter believed in it, and he was proved right. He would go first for the genes and leave the 'junk' for later. The competition cried foul: this was not cricket. John Maddox, editor of the premier scientific journal, Nature, was favoured with a threatening phone call from a leading American geneticist (unnamed): if he should publish 'this Venter stuff' no members of the American 'genome community' would ever offer their results to his journal again. (Maddox was not intimidated.) As bad as skimming the cream from the genome was giving first refusal on gene sequences to commercial interests - no matter that NIH had itself been taking out patents on genes (likened by a French worker to patenting the moon). Francis Collins, the project director, a born-again Christian and Venter's most tenacious critic, had himself patented the cystic fibrosis gene, which he had uncovered some years earlier. Venter's argument was that if the sequence data were published and could not therefore be patented, no pharmaceutical company would want to work on them in pursuit of drugs.

Venter duly confounded his critics by producing complete sequences of the genome of a pathogenic bacterium, and then of the fruit-fly - an object of throbbing interest to geneticists - in six months. The Cambridge arm of the HGP had taken seven years to complete the genome of another creature of interest, a worm. In his pursuit of the human genome, Venter made abundant use of the data emerging from the public programme, but what of that? In response to the torrent of humbug by this time issuing from all quarters he countered that the HGP's data were purportedly free to all, and that the HGP had made even greater use of his own, which were more accurate (as indeed they often were). In 2000 an uneasy truce was declared, and at a ceremony in the White House President Clinton and Tony Blair celebrated the consummation of the grand design, which in reality was still far from concluded (it was said that the date was dictated by a rare gap in the diaries of both President and Prime Minister). Venter had been vindicated; it was a tribute to his powers of persuasion, his formidable organising skills, and above all his manic determination. As Bernard Shaw remarked, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Acrimony alas soon returned, and the members of the public programme fell to squabbling among themselves. A journalist wrote: 'More and more, the Human Genome Project, supposedly one of mankind's noblest undertakings, is resembling a mud-wrestling match.'

Whatever view one chooses to take of Venter, his version of the story makes a wholly absorbing narrative, and a document that will be minutely picked over by future historians. The truth in such matters is elusive, and as the canny Elizabethan courtier Sir Walter Raleigh observed, 'Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.' One thing is clear: science has changed since the prelapsarian days when our Medical Research Council refused to contemplate patenting penicillin, or any other discovery that might benefit mankind.