Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science (23 page)

Craig Venter stood watching the robots move. The room smelled faintly like the contents of a human intestine. “This used to be done by hand,” he said. All the human DNA fragments would eventually wind up in the Prism sequencing machines, and what would be left, at the end, was a collection of up to twenty-two million random fragments of sequenced human DNA. Then the river of shattered DNA would come to the supercomputer, and to a computer scientist named Eugene Myers, who with his team would assemble all the broken bits of human code into the more-or-less correct order, producing the full human genome.

G
ENE
M
YERS
had dark hair and a chiseled, handsome face. He wore glasses, a green half-carat emerald in his left ear, and brown Doc Martens shoes. He also had a ruby and a sapphire that he would wear in his ear, instead of the emerald, depending on his mood. He was sensitive to cold. On the hottest days of summer, Myers wore a yellow Patagonia fleece jacket, and he kept a scarf wrapped around his neck. “My blood’s thin,” he explained to me. He said the scarf was a reference to the DNA of whatever organism he happened to be working on. When I first met Myers, he was keeping himself warm in his fruit-fly scarf. It had a black-and-white zigzag pattern. Later, Myers started wearing his human scarf, which had a green chenille weave of changing stripes. He intended his scarf to make a statement about the warfare between Celera and the public project. “I picked green for my human scarf because I’ve heard that green is a positive, healing color,” he said. “I really want all this bickering to go away.” His office was a cubicle in a sea of cubicles, most of which were stocked with Nerf guns, Stomp Rockets, and plastic Viking helmets. Occasionally, Myers would put “Ride of the Valkyries” on a boom box, and in a loud voice he would declare war. Nerf battles swept through Celera whenever the tension rose. Myers fielded a compound double-action Nerf Lock ’n Load Blaster equipped with a Hyper Sight. “Last week we slaughtered the chromosome team,” he told me.

I
N THE FALL
, Venter announced that Celera had completed the sequencing of the fruit fly’s DNA and had begun to run human DNA through its sequencing machines—there were now three hundred of them crammed into Building One in Rockville. The Command Center was up and running, and from then on Celera operated in high-speed mode. One day that fall, I talked with the company’s information expert, a stocky man named Marshall Peterson. He took me to the computer room, in Building Two. To get into the room, Peterson punched in a security code and then placed his hand on a sensor, which read the unique pattern of his palm. There was a clack of bolts sliding back. We pushed through the door.

A chill of cold air washed over us, and we entered a room filled with racks of computers that were wired together. “We have fifty-five miles of fiber-optic cables running through this building,” Peterson said. Workmen standing on ladders were installing many more cables in the ceiling. “The disk storage in this room is five times the size of the Library of Congress. We’re getting more storage all the time. We need it.”

He took me to the Command Center, where a couple of people were hanging around consoles. A big screen on the wall showed CNN Headline News. “I’ve got a full-time hacker working for me to prevent security breaches,” Peterson said. “We’re getting feelers over the Internet all the time—people trying to break into our system.” Celera would be dealing with potentially valuable information about the genes of all kinds of organisms. Peterson thought that some of what he called feelers—subtle hacks and unfriendly probes—had been emanating from Celera’s competitors. He said he could never prove it, though. Lately, the probes had been coming from computers in Japan. He thought it was American hackers co-opting the Japanese machines over the Internet.

By October 20, forty days after Celera started running human DNA through its machines, the company announced that it had sequenced 1.2 billion letters of human code. The letters came in small chunks from all over the genome. Six days later, Venter announced that Celera had filed provisional patent applications for sixty-five hundred human genes. The applications were for placeholder patents. The company hoped to figure out later which of the genes would be worth patenting in earnest.

A gene patent gives its holder the right to make commercial products and drugs derived from the gene for a period of seventeen years. Pharmaceutical companies argue that patents are necessary, because without them businesses would never invest the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to develop a new drug and get it through the licensing process of the Food and Drug Administration. (“If you have a disease, you’d better hope someone patents the gene for it,” Venter said to me.) On the other hand, parceling out genes to various private companies could lead to what Francis Collins referred to as the “Balkanization of the human genome,” a paralyzing situation that might limit researchers’ access to genes.

Venter insisted that Celera was an information company and that patenting genes was not its main goal. He had said that Celera would attempt to get patents on not more than about three hundred human genes. Even so, it was pretty clear that Celera was hoping to nail down some very valuable real estate in the human genome—billion-dollar genes, perhaps.

All summer long, Celera’s stock had bounced around between seven and ten dollars a share. Around Halloween, as investors began to realize that the company was cranking out the human genome—and filing large numbers of patents on genes—the stock jumped up to twenty dollars a share. On December 2, the Human Genome Project announced that it had deciphered most of the code on chromosome no. 22, the second-shortest chromosome in the human genome. This made the reading of the whole genome seem doable and imminent, and Celera’s stock began a spectacular, tornadic rise of a sort that has rarely been seen in the American stock market. It shot up that day by nine points, and closed at over seventy dollars. Then, after the market’s close on Thursday, December 16, Tom Gardner, a cofounder of the Web site called the Motley Fool, announced that he was buying shares of Celera for his own portfolio. It was known as the Rule Breaker Portfolio, and it featured small companies that broke the rules and changed the landscape of business.

Celera came of age during the huge rise of the Internet stock-market bubble. When the news broke that Celera had been named to the Motley Fool’s Rule Breaker Portfolio, a large number of people tried to buy Celera the next morning. They drove the stock up twenty points in a matter of minutes. A few months earlier, it had been trading at seven dollars a share. Celera’s stock price looked like it was headed for Mars.

I went to visit Celera one day the following week. On that particular morning the company’s stock could not even open for trading on the New York Stock Exchange. That morning, it seemed as though all of Wall Street wanted to buy Celera. That morning a tsunami of buy orders for Celera overwhelmed the specialists on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Trading in Celera froze, while the traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange waited for sell orders to trickle in. While the stock was halted—at $101 a share—I wandered around the building.

There was a feeling of shock in the air. Everyone was aware of the trading halt in the stock; everyone in the building owned Celera stock. Just about every employee of Celera was becoming a multimillionaire, and it seemed to be happening by the minute. I felt that very little work was getting done that day at Celera, except by the robots. Employees were checking the stock quote on Yahoo! and wondering what their net worth would be in an hour or two, when the stock would finally open and start trading.

I found Hamilton Smith in his lab, puttering around with human DNA in tiny test tubes. He seemed to be the only person at the company who wasn’t very affected by the situation. He was tired and looked sleep-deprived. He explained that he was renovating his house and had stayed up all night ripping carpet out of the basement. “The carpet guys were coming in to lay new carpet in the basement, and I didn’t feel like paying them to rip out the old carpet,” he said. “It would have been expensive.” Hamilton Smith owned many thousands of shares of Celera, and his net worth was already in the many millions. He also refused to buy a new car. He had driven to work that day, as usual, in his ’83 Mercury Marquis.

Smith passed a computer, stopped, and brought up a quote. Celera had finally opened for trading. It had gapped upward—that is, it had jumped instantly upward—by thirteen points. It was at 114. Smith’s net worth had jumped upward by around a million dollars in ten seconds. “Is there no end to this?” he muttered.

Craig Venter came into Smith’s lab and asked him to lunch. In the elevator, Smith said to him, “I can’t stand it, Craig. The bubble will break.” They sat down beside each other in the cafeteria and ate cassoulet from bowls on trays.

“This defies common sense,” Smith went on. “It’s really impossible to put a value on this company.”

“That’s what we’ve been telling the analysts,” Venter said.

Later that day, I ended up in Claire Fraser’s office at
TIGR
headquarters, a complex of semi–Mission style buildings a couple of miles from Celera’s offices and labs. Fraser, who was then Venter’s wife, was a tall, reserved woman with dark hair and brown eyes, and her voice had a New England accent. She grew up in Massachusetts. In high school, she said, she was considered a science geek. Her office had an Oriental rug on the floor and a table surrounded by Chippendale chairs. (“This is Craig’s extravagant taste, not mine,” she explained.) Two poodles, Shadow and Marley, slept by a fireplace.

“Before genomics, every living organism was a black box,” she said. “When you sequence a genome, it’s like walking into a dark room and turning on a light. You see entirely new things everywhere.”

Fraser placed a sheet of paper on the table. It contained an impossibly complicated diagram that looked like a design for an oil refinery. She explained that it was an analysis of the genome of cholera, a single-celled microbe that causes murderous diarrhea;
TIGR
scientists had finished sequencing the organism’s DNA a few weeks earlier. Much of the picture, she said, was absolutely new to our knowledge of life. About a quarter of the genes of every microbe that had been decoded by
TIGR
were completely new to science and were not obviously related to any other gene in any other microbe. To the intense surprise and wonder of the scientists, nature was turning out to be an uncharted sea of unknown genes. The code of life was far richer and more beautiful than anyone had imagined.

Fraser’s eyes moved quickly over the diagram. In effect, she was seeing cholera for the first time in the history of biology. And she could sight-read the diagram, in the same way that a good musician can sight-read Mozart and hear it in her head. “Yes…wow…,” Fraser murmured. “Wow. There may be important transporters here…. It looks like there could be potential for designing a new drug that could block them.”

The phone rang. Fraser walked across her office, picked up the receiver, and said softly, “Craig? Hello. What? It closed at a hundred and twenty-five?” Pause. “I don’t know how much it’s worth. You’re the one with the calculator.”

Their net worth had jumped above $150 million that day.

Fraser drove home, and I followed her in my car. The house she shared with Venter was in a wealthy neighborhood outside Washington. It sat behind a security gate at the end of a long driveway. Venter arrived in a brand-new Porsche. The car would do zero to sixty in five seconds, he said. In the vaulted front hall of the house there was a model of HMS
Victory
in a glass case. In a room next to the garage, there was a jumble of woodworking machines—a band saw, a table saw, a drill press. Venter had worked with wood since his shop classes in high school.

In the kitchen, Claire fixed dinner for the poodles, while Craig circled the room, talking. “We created close to two hundred millionaires in the company today. I think most of them had not a clue this would happen when they joined Celera. We have a secretary who became a millionaire today. She’s married to a retired policeman. He went out looking to buy a farm.” He popped a Bud Light and swigged it. “This could only happen in America. You’ve got to love this country.” Claire fed the poodles.

There were no cooking tools in the kitchen that I could see. The counters were empty. The only food I noticed was a giant sack of dog food, sitting on top of an island counter, and two boxes of cold cereal—Quaker Oatmeal Squares and Total. In the guest bathroom, upstairs, there were no towels, and the walls were empty. The only decorative object in the bathroom was a cheap wicker basket piled with little soaps and shampoos they had picked up in hotels.

We went to a restaurant and ate steak. “We’re in the Wild West of genomics,” Venter said. “Celera is more than a scientific experiment; it’s a business experiment. Our stock-market capitalization as of today is three and a half billion dollars. That’s more than the projected cost of the Human Genome Project. I guess that’s saying something. The combined market value of the Big Three genomics companies—Celera, Human Genome Sciences, and Incyte—was about twelve billion dollars at the end of today. This wasn’t imaginable six months ago. The Old Guard doesn’t have control of genomics anymore.” He chewed steak and looked at his wife. “What the hell are we going to do with all this money? I could play around with boats…”

Claire started laughing. “My God, I couldn’t live with you.”

“The money’s nice, but it’s not the motivation,” Venter said to me. “The motivation is sheer curiosity.”