The Genome War

This book caught my eye while I was reading Jurvetson's blog. It's a totally fascinating read. This story for those unaware is a battle between Venter's company Celera and the NIH for who could sequence the Genome first. The cast of characters were all new to me, and a quick google for some of the big players returned big results. Gene Myers, a computational biologist originally from the University of Arizona, and now at Berkeley, played a huge role in the design of the algorithms responsible for the "whole genome shotgun technique." This was Celera's competitve advantage against the NIH's slow and steady yet supposedly accurate. Celeras technique could be compared to dumping an entire puzzle on the ground and then immediately assembling the pieces(genes) back into the puzzle. The NIH, used a slower piecemeal approach - comparing each part of the puzzle to all the pieces until a match was found. This technique, while accurate, was impossibly slow to compete with the Celera model. Heated debate ensued as the NIH scientists dismissed the whole genome shotgun approach as "not real science." Too bad for them, it panned out. I find Gene to be the most interesting of the group, probably because my interest lie more in the technology than the science, but also because I really feel like none of the fame bestowed upon Venter would have happened without him.

Some important definitions gleaned from the book here, with some help from Wikipedia:

cDNA or complimentary DNA, this is synthesized from mature mRNA.
mRNA is RNA that encodes and carries information from DNA to sites of protein synthesis
SNP or single nucleotide polymorphism is a DNA sequence variation, occurring when a single nucleotide: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) or guanine (G) - in the genome is altered