Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science (19 page)

Ruppol had lost his sense of self-protection during the emergency, but had gotten lucky. The mother hadn’t had Ebola.

Close thought it was just typical of the way doctors can forget themselves when a patient is in trouble. It didn’t give him any confidence, though, that the doctors had the situation with emerging viruses and microbes under control. “In the battle between the doctors and the bugs,” he remarked, “in the long run, I’d put my money on the bugs.”

The Human Kabbalah

“C
RAIG
V
ENTER IS AN ASS
. He’s an idiot. He is a thorn in people’s sides and an egomaniac,” a senior scientist in the Human Genome Project said to me one day. The Human Genome Project was an ongoing nonprofit international research consortium that had been working to decipher the complete sequence of nucleotides, or letters, in human DNA. The human genome is the total amount of DNA that is spooled into a set of twenty-three chromosomes in the nucleus of every typical human cell. (There are two sets of chromosomes, for a total of forty-six chromosomes in each human cell.) This entire package of DNA in every cell is sometimes referred to as the book of human life. Most scientists agreed that deciphering it would be one of the great achievements of our time. The stakes, in money and glory, to say nothing of the future of medicine, were huge and incalculable.

In the United States, most of the money to pay for the Human Genome Project had been coming from the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. The project was often referred to, in a kind of shorthand, as the “public project,” to distinguish it from for-profit enterprises like the Celera Genomics Group, of which Craig Venter was the president and chief scientific officer. “In my perception,” said the scientist who was giving me the dour view of Venter, “Craig has a personal vendetta against the National Institutes of Health. I look at Craig as being an extremely shallow person who is only interested in Craig Venter and in making money. Only God knows what those people at Celera are doing.”

What Venter and his colleagues were doing was preparing to announce that they had placed in the proper order something like 95 percent of the readable letters in the human genetic code. They were referring to this milestone as the first assembly. They had already started selling information about the human genome to subscribers. The Human Genome Project, largely in response to Craig Venter and the corporate effort to read the human book of life, was also on the verge of announcing a milestone. Its scientists were calling their milestone a “working draft” of the genome. They were claiming it was more than 90 percent complete, and they were making the information available to anyone, free of charge, on a database called GenBank. Both images of the human genome—Celera’s and the public project’s—were becoming clearer and clearer. The book of life and death was opening, and we held it in our hands.

A
HUMAN
DNA
MOLECULE
is about a meter long. It is about a twenty-millionth of a meter wide—the width of twenty hydrogen atoms. It is shaped like a twisted ladder. Each rung of the ladder is made of one of four nucleotides—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The DNA code is expressed in combinations of the letters A, T, C, and G, the first letters of the names of the nucleotides. The human genome contains at least 3.2 billion letters of genetic code. This is about the number of letters in three thousand copies of
Moby-Dick.

Perhaps three percent of the human code consists of genes. Genes hold the recipes for making proteins. Human genes are stretches of between a thousand and fifteen hundred letters of code, often broken into pieces and separated by long passages of DNA that don’t code for proteins. It is believed that there are about twenty-five thousand genes in the human genome. Much of the rest of the genome consists of blocks of seemingly meaningless letters, gobbledygook. These sections are referred to as junk DNA, although it may be that we just don’t understand the function of the apparent junk.

The conventional route for announcing scientific breakthroughs is publication in a scientific journal. Both Celera and the Human Genome Project were planning to publish annotated versions of the human genome as soon as possible. Although the two sides looked like armies maneuvering for advantage, the leaders of the Human Genome Project had always denied that they were involved in some kind of competition with Craig Venter.

“They’re trying to say it’s not a race, right?” Venter said to me, in a shrugging sort of way. “But if two sailboats are sailing near each other, then by definition it’s a race. If one boat wins, then the winner says, ‘We smoked them,’ and the loser says, ‘Eh, we weren’t racing—we were just cruising.’”

I first met Craig Venter on a windy day in the summer of 1999, at Celera’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, a half-hour drive northwest of Washington, D.C. The company’s offices and laboratories occupied a pair of five-story white buildings with mirrored windows, surrounded by beautiful groves of red oaks and yellow poplar trees. One of the buildings contained rooms packed with row after row of DNA-sequencing machines of a type known as the ABI Prism. The other building held what was said to be the most powerful civilian computer array in the world. The Celera supercomputer complex was of considerable interest to Gregory and David Chudnovsky, the mathematicians who had used a homemade supercomputer to calculate the number pi, and who ended up meeting with Craig Venter and his staff, talking with them about the design of supercomputers and software used in sequencing the human genome. Venter’s supercomputer complex was surpassed only, perhaps, by that of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is used for simulating nuclear bomb explosions.

The computer building at Celera also contained the Command Center. This was a room stuffed with control consoles and computer screens. The Command Center was manned all the time. It monitored the flow of DNA inside Celera. The DNA was flowing through the machines twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

That hot summer day, Craig Venter moved restlessly around his office. There had been a spate of newspaper stories about the race to decode the complete genome, and about the pressure Celera was putting on its competitors. “We’re scaring the crap out of everybody, including ourselves,” he said to me.

Venter was fifty-three at the time. He had an active, cherubic face on which a smile often flickered. He was bald, with a fuzz of short hair at the temples, and his head was usually sunburned. He had bright blue eyes and a soft voice. That day, he was wearing khaki slacks and a blue shirt, New Balance running shoes, a preppy tie with small turtles on it, and a Rolex watch. Venter’s office looked out into stands of trees; leaves were spinning on branches outside the windows, flashing their white undersides and promising thunderstorms. Beyond the trees, a chronic traffic jam was occurring on the Rockville Pike. Celera was in an area along a stretch of Interstate 270 known as the biotechnology corridor, which was dense with companies specializing in the life sciences, and billions of dollars in venture capital were embedded in bioenterprises all around Celera.

Celera Genomics was a part of the PE Corporation, which had been called Perkin-Elmer before the company’s chief executive, Tony L. White, split the business into two parts: PE Biosystems, now called Applera, which made the DNA sequencing machine called the Prism, and Celera. Venter owned five percent of Celera’s stock. It had been trading, often violently, on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock had been tossed by waves of panic selling and panic buying. That particular summer day, the stock market was valuing Celera at around three billion dollars. Craig Venter’s own net worth had been slopping around by five or ten million dollars a day in either direction, like water going back and forth in a bathtub.

“Our fundamental business model is like Bloomberg’s,” Venter said. “We’re selling information about the vast universe of molecular medicine.” Venter hoped, for example, that one day Celera would help analyze the genomes of millions of people as a regular part of its business. This would be done over the Internet, he felt—and, having decoded individual patients’ DNA, the company would then help design or select drugs tailored to patients’ particular needs. In recent times, genomics has been moving so fast that it’s possible to think that pretty soon you will be able to walk into a doctor’s office and have your own genome read and interpreted. It could be stored in a smart card. (You would want to keep the card in your wallet, in case you landed in an emergency room. But you wouldn’t want to lose it, because if thieves got your DNA sequence, they might
really
be able to clone you.) Your doctor would read the smart card, and it would show your total biological-software code. Your doctor would be able to see the bugs in your code. The bugs are genes that make you vulnerable to certain diseases; everyone has bugs in their code. If you became sick, doctors could watch the activity of your genes, using so-called gene chips, which are small pieces of glass containing detectors for every gene. Doctors could track how your body responded to treatment. All your genes could be observed, operating in an immense symphony.

Venter stopped moving briefly, sat down in front of a screen, and tapped a keyboard. A Yahoo! quote came up. “Hey, we’re over twenty today,” he said. Meanwhile, I was standing in front of a large model of Venter’s yacht, the
Sorcerer,
in which he’d won the 1997 Transatlantic Challenge in an upset victory—it was the only major ocean race he’d ever entered. “I got the boat for a bargain from the guy who founded Lands’ End,” Venter said. “I like to buy cast-off things on the cheap from ultrarich people.”

Venter went into the hallway, and I followed him. Celera was renovating its space, and tiles were hanging from the ceiling. Some had fallen to the floor. Black stains dripped out of air-conditioning vents, and sheets of plywood were lying around. Workmen were Sheetrocking walls, ripping up carpet, and installing light fixtures, and the smell of paint and spackle drifted in the air. We took the stairs to the basement and entered a room that held about fifty Prism DNA-sequencing machines. Each Prism was the size of a small refrigerator and had cost three hundred thousand dollars. Prisms were the fastest DNA sequencers on earth. At the moment, they were reading the DNA of the fruit fly. This was a pilot project for the human genome. The machines contained lasers, which were used for reading the letters in DNA. Heat from the lasers seemed to ripple from the machines. The lasers were shining light on tiny tubes through which strands of fruit-fly DNA were moving, and the light was passing through the DNA, and sensors were reading the letters of the code. Each machine had a computer screen on which blocks of numbers and letters were scrolling past. It was fly code.

“You’re looking at the third-largest DNA-sequencing facility in the world,” Venter said. “We also have the second largest and the largest.”

We got into an elevator. The walls of the elevator were dented and bashed. Venter led me into a vast, low-ceilinged room that looked out into the trees. This was the largest DNA-decoding factory on earth. The room contained 150 Prisms—forty-five million dollars’ worth—and more Prisms were due to be installed any day. Just below the ceiling, air ducts dangled on straps, and one wall consisted of gypsum board.

Venter moved restlessly through the unfinished space. “This is the most futuristic manufacturing plant on the planet right now,” he said. Outdoors, the rain came, splattering on the windows, and the poplar leaves shivered. We stopped and looked over a sea of machines. “You’re seeing Henry Ford’s first assembly plant,” he said. “What don’t you see? People, right? There are three people working in this room. A year ago, this work would have taken one thousand to two thousand scientists. With this technology, we are literally coming out of the dark ages of biology. As a civilization, we know far less than one percent of what will be known about biology, human physiology, and medicine. My view of biology is ‘We don’t know squat.’”

J. Craig Venter recently, in a sailboat.
Evan Hurd/Getty Images

Some observers thought the company could fail. It was burning through at least $150 million a year. This flow of money going out of Celera was what venture capitalists called the “burn rate” of a start-up company—its negative cash flow, its consumption of money without (yet) producing a cash return on the investment. Who, I wondered, would want to buy the information the company was generating, and how much would they pay for it? “There will be an incredible demand for genomic information,” Venter assured me. “When the first electric-power companies strung up wires on power poles, there were a lot of skeptics. They said, ‘Who’s going to buy all that electricity?’ We already have more than a hundred million dollars in committed subscription revenues over five years from companies that are buying genomic information from us—Amgen, Novartis, Pharmacia & Upjohn, and others. After we finish the human genome, we could do the mouse, rice, rat, dog, cow, corn, maybe apple trees, maybe clover. We could do the chimpanzee.”