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redux, if you will. It's the notion that life-if not life's value-can be
explained by the laws of chemistry and physics, and that,
a
la William
Carlos Williams, there are "No ideas but in things." Loeb and the mech–
anists believed that revolutions in science have enlarged the place of fact
in a world of value. Many of us agree with the mechanists that Western,
experimental science is by definition, uni- and not multicultural: scien–
tists from many cultures produce the single culture of science.
In
that
empire of fact, each can claim"
Civis Scientium sum."
What I've called
The Biological Revolution
(1976)
has experimental
and entrepreneurial components. Craig Venter's company was launched
with the motto "Speed Matters," and speed mattered in the genome race.
The Human Genome Project was formally launched in
1987
by the
Department of Energy, no doubt because the DOE (a.k.a. Atomic Energy
Commission) had both excess computing capacity and experience with
radiation effects on human genes. Supporting this effort was a report from
the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences which
early in
1988
estimated that deciphering the genome would cost three bil–
lion dollars, and be finished as early as
2003.
Later in
1988,
James Wat–
son was put in charge of a consortium, which included labs of the DOE,
the National Institutes of Health, and international brigades from France,
Britain, and Japan. Inevitable conflicts arose, many involving the person
of James Watson himself. By
1993,
the spiritually correct Francis Collins
took over leadership of the public effort and promised results by
2005.
Craig Venter, on the other hand, had started out at the NIH, but soon
grew impatient with the pace of the affair. After working out novel
methods for expressing and sequencing genes ("expressed sequence
tags" and "the whole genome shotgun method"), Venter founded Cel–
era Genomics in
1998
vowing to unravel the human genome better and
faster. He estimated that it would cost Celera about
250
million dollars
and that he'd be finished in
200I.
He raised the money, harnessed new
sequencing machinery, and the race was on. The consortium struck back
in a hasty effort to recoup. By August of
2000,
both groups announced
that the map of the human genome was pretty much finished and in Jan–
uary
2001,
joint, if slightly disparate, maps were published. Bottom
line-public effort: 14 years, two billion dollars; private effort:
2
112
years,
250
million dollars.
Was there anything like this before in human history: a national com–
petition, in which a small group of private entrepreneurs beat out a huge
public consortium headed by perhaps the finest scientist of his day? Actu–
ally, there is a precedent, and it's the story of the
Encyclopedie.
In
1675,
Colbert asked the Academie des Sciences to prepare an illustrated cata-
