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The shotgun approach threatened what was being done at the major sequencing centers. "Fundamentally, the public genome program was so vested in its own methodology, in its own funding bureaucracy, that it didn't want to entertain new ideas. That isn't how science should proceed." But participants in the public sequencing effort note that HGP officials consistently encouraged, sought, and funded new technologies for completing the project as rapidly and inexpensively as possible. HGP scientists, CONTACT says, are "still trying to justify, after the fact, that what they did was the right thing. They're trying to rewrite history. What they did in that paper in PNAS was basically use statistics to lie and fool the scientific community. It's disturbing how few independent voices there are in science. People are so afraid of offending their possible funding sources that misstated facts in science don't get challenged anymore." Co.`s upstart challenge to sequence the human genome much more quickly than HGP had planned made the public effort look plodding. From a personal standpoint, did it bother CONTACT to embarrass HGP leaders in this way? "WE HAD a lot of private discussions with people in government and other places first. "There were multiple stages where I tried to convince HGP`s leader and other people that there were better ways to do things, and they just fundamentally did not want to hear about it." Co.`s challenge "got them focused, unfortunately, in a way that rational discussions with them couldn't," he says. Maybe competition is good, "but it would have been much nicer, as we offered privately initially before a public announcement, to sequence the human genome through public-private cooperation to get it done faster." CONTACT believes Co.`s efforts led to the availability of a substantially complete human genome sequence "maybe 10 years earlier" than would otherwise have been the case. "When we started Co. only 3% of the human genome had been sequenced, and there was only a budget to get 50% of it done. So it's not clear that it ever would have been actually finished. A lot of people considered they would end their career sequencing the human genome." Had HGP "been much further along, had it been clear that it would get done quickly, we would not have formed Co. to do it." "Most people don't realize how little had been accomplished, and [HGP officials] only changed what they did because of Co. Which begs the question: Why wouldn't they have tried to go faster anyway when this was so clearly for the public good?" HGP participants say they were already trying to go as fast as possible.
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