Eric S. Lander, director, Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, and the Nature paper's first author, is awed by the numbers, but is also realistic: "It is the genome, after all."
"First-timer's" pressure, coupled with a public-private rivalry that the mass media salivated over, made a daunting task downright fearsome. Months of negotiations aimed at simultaneously publishing in Science fell apart over data-access policies.1 Amidst these significant maneuverings the groups still had to go through the same writing, reviewing, and editing processes shared by all hopeful authors, only at an unprecedented scale. The papers were published, in rival journals, a day apart.
"Here we knew that it would be one of the most important papers ever published," says J. Craig Venter, Celera's former president and chief scientific officer. "It was going to be examined historically for a long period of time. It was going to be scrutinized." On Jan. 22 ...
