Rewriting History at the Smithsonian?

Laura Helmuth has a provocative piece up at Slate with the title "Watch Francis Collins Lunge For a Nobel Prize". She points out that the NIH and the Smithsonian are making a big deal out of celebrating the "10th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome", even though many people seem to recall the big deal being in 2001 - not 2003. Yep, that was when the huge papers came out in Science and Nature with all the charts and foldouts, and the big press conferences and headlines. February of 2001. So why the "tenth anniversary" stuff this year? Well, 2003 is the year that the NIH team published its more complete version of the genome. That's the anniversary they've chosen to remember. If you start making a big deal out of 2001, you have to start making a big deal out of the race between that group and the Celera group - and you start having to, you know, share credit. Now, I make no claims for Craig Venter's personality or style. But I don't see how it can be denied that he and his group vastly sped up the sequencing of the genome, and arrived at a similar result in far less time than the NIH consortium. The two drafts of the sequence were published simultaneously, even though there seems to have been a lot of elbow-throwing by the NIH folks to keep that from happening. The NIH has been hosting anniversary events all year, but the most galling anniversary claim is made in an exhibit that opened this year at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the seco...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Biological News Source Type: blogs