Human Genome Project history 8: A genome available to all 28/2/01. By Georgina Ferry Celera's approach to human genome sequencing challenged the guiding ethos of the public Human Genome Project: free and unrestricted access to genome data.

Following the example set by the worm sequencing project, all the information produced by public human sequencing centres was immediately and freely available to the biomedical research community, via the Internet, with no restrictions on how it could be used.

These principles were enshrined in an agreement on human sequencing brokered at a strategy meeting sponsored by the Wellcome Trust in Bermuda in February 1996, and extended to data on other organisms at a later meeting.

Celera, by contrast, aimed to make its data available only to paying customers, and planned to patent some sequences before releasing them. Other companies, notably Incyte and Human Genome Sciences, were already operating on this basis, going after individual genes rather than the whole genome.

For John Sulston, releasing sequence information quickly was partly a matter of giving the biomedical community the earliest possible chance to do something useful with it, but also, importantly, it was a means of putting those sequences beyond the reach of commercial companies that might want to patent them or charge for access to the information.

While not opposed to the patenting of products such as diagnostic tests or drugs, Dr Sulston and the other leaders of the publicly funded project viewed the patenting of the human sequence itself as unethical and an obstacle to the rapid application of genomic information to health problems.

"People have to take democratic responsibility for the human genome," says Dr Sulston. "It's not something that can be left to the commercial manufacturers, like making motor cars."

This principled stand was vindicated in March 2000 when US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a joint statement endorsing the public release of genomic data.