The private effort, a joint venture between Perkin-Elmer Inc., a Norwalk, Conn., manufacturer of sequencing equipment, and J. Craig Venter , president and director of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Md., would be embodied by a new company formed to sequence the entire human genome by 2001, and at an estimated cost of $150 million to $300 million. Faster, more automated sequencing machines recently unveiled by Perkin-Elmer, and a different sequencing strategy espoused by Venter make that target feasible. The federally sponsored Human Genome Project, which has a total estimated budget of $3 billion, is on schedule to finish sequencing the approximately 3 billion base pairs of DNA that make up the human genome by 2005.
MIXED SIGNALS: NHGRI's Francis Collins has sent mixed signals about whether the public and private sequencing ventures can cooperate. Francis Collins , director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, cautions ...
