The Genome War by James Shreeve

Author:James Shreeve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
ISBN: 9780307417060
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

HE DOESN’T GET IT

On Tuesday of the following week, the cafeteria tables in the basement were cleared away to make room for Celera’s second all-hands meeting. Things had changed since the first one. Back in September, a few dozen people had gathered on the ground floor and gotten high on the promise in its moldy air and on the great adventure to come. Now, six months later, the rows of chairs stretched almost to the back wall. Most were occupied by people with jobs, not visions. Due to the sheer weight of numbers—Celera now had almost 350 employees—a point had been reached where people’s primary loyalties were directed toward their own departments rather than the company as a whole. Body language defined the edges of bailiwicks, and for the most part dress defined role. Secretaries came into the meeting wearing pumps and skirts. Asian software engineers sat in calm attentive rows, their button-down shirts neatly tucked in. Pale, pierced techies in T-shirts and jeans blinked and twitched from being so abruptly yanked into an analog world. Robert Millman, the patent attorney, was the exception, erect and alone at the edge of one row, wearing a fractal-patterned brown silk shirt over corduroy trousers that were as subtle as chartreuse can be. In his long face and bright sunken eyes was the look of a Sufi who had come down to the meeting from some mountaintop. Gene Myers, huddled with the other senior people in the front, had spruced himself up. His hair was combed, his citrus fleece zipped up and squared off against his pants, and his scarf crossed neatly on his left shoulder.

Everyone at the gathering was about to become not just a Celera employee but a shareholder, just as soon as the company’s stock went public in a couple of weeks. Tony White had come down from Connecticut to explain what that was going to mean. He had brought along Dennis Winger, his chief financial officer, and some other brass from the parent company, who had dressed down for the occasion by taking off their suit jackets and ties. Peter Barrett stood with them, in a sweatshirt with CELERA and the company’s new logo—a tiny dancing figure whose tapered limbs formed a subtle double helix—printed discreetly on the breast in blue. Boxes full of the sweatshirts were piled by the door, one for everybody on the way out.

There had been major changes in the parent company as well in the past few months. Perkin Elmer’s analytical instruments division, its heart and soul since its founding in the thirties, was about to be sold for $338 million to a conglomerate called EG&G. Along with it went the Perkin Elmer name. From now on, Celera’s parent, renamed “PE Corporation,” would be devoted exclusively to life sciences, with two divisions. White took out a marker and on a flip chart nearly as tall as himself drew two great overlapping circles, like a Venn diagram. He labeled one circle “PE Biosystems,” which

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