More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement by Naam Ramez

Author:Naam, Ramez [Naam, Ramez]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2005-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8 – Designer Children

Craig Venter has been called many things – arrogant, brash, disdainful, egomaniacal, even “Darth Venter”. He’s seldom been called humble. The tall, intense, balding scientist has never been one to back away from a fight. It takes confidence to believe that one can challenge and beat the most ambitious scientific project of the last half century. In 1997, that’s what the maverick biologist did when he founded Celera Genomics, a company devoted to sequencing the human genome in just three years. At that point, the competing public Human Genome Project (HGP) run by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) was about 10 percent done with its own sequencing of human DNA. The HGP was funded to the tune of more than ten billion dollars and on track to finish their work in another five years. Yet with only $300 million of corporate backing and a late start, Venter set out to beat them at their own game.

Venter succeeded in sequencing the human genome in those three short years, and his challenge spurred the public HGP forward, so that the two groups simultaneously released their results in 2000, two years ahead of the public project’s original schedule.

Journalist James Shreeve does a masterful job of telling the story of the personalities in the race to sequence the genome in his book The Genome War. Yet underlying those personal stories is a story of technology and how its progress will affect our world.

The key to Celera’s success was a technique called shotgun sequencing. In normal gene sequencing, the long strands of DNA that make up a genome are first mapped out to identify key landmarks. Then the DNA is copied several times and divided into shorter overlapping segments. Those segments can then be read to determine their exact sequence. Researchers refer back to the map to determine where this particular sequence fits in the grand scheme. If you imagine the genome as a giant jigsaw puzzle, it’s as if the researchers assemble the entire puzzle, then take each piece, carefully note where it is, and sequence it. By remembering where in the puzzle it belongs, they can then assemble the entire sequence.

Shotgun sequencing isn’t so careful. It chops DNA up into short overlapping strands, but doesn’t take any note of a map or where those strands fit. Instead, after sequencing each strand, a computer uses the overlaps between them to fit them all back together. The researchers never put the jigsaw puzzle together in the first place, which saves them time and money. While the Human Genome Project avoided shotgun sequencing as too radical and too dependent on computers, Venter made a bet on it, and the bet paid off – Celera was able to sequence the human genome at somewhere between thirty and fifty times less cost than the public project, and substantially faster as well.

Shotgun sequencing was not the first speed and cost improvement in sequencing technology. Nor was it the last. According to the NHGRI,

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