The Secret of Life

Over the next 10 years, we should see a dramatic increase in new pharmaceuticals, and we should start seeing new ways to understand the disease process as well. That shift is going to have a huge impact on Celera's business. Celera will be the driving force in this new way of looking at disease -- even if other companies are having breakthroughs of their own.

Where do you stand on deciphering and publishing the genetic code?

In April, we announced that we had finished the sequencing phase of the project. Once our computers had all of the components necessary to start the assembly phase -- the phase when we put all of those components together -- we started trying to solve the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. That puzzle has more than 20 million pieces, and each piece is a string that is 600 letters long. Our task was to put all of them in the right order, to find out which letters go in which sequence and which letters overlap. We finished that phase this past summer, and we are now having an annotation jamboree, just as we did with the fruit-fly genome. Publication will follow soon after we're done with that.

Finishing the sequence in the assembly is the end of the beginning. It's sort of the end of the grunt work. Then we can start to interpret the genetic code.

What do you expect to learn from this data?

We will probably work for the rest of the 21st century to understand what the data means. But we will learn much more about who we are and about where we came from. We'll also come to understand evolution better, and we'll gain a deeper understanding of our own history as a species.

We now have the means to answer a lot of the key questions that we've always had. That fact will surely have as profound an impact on our society and on our species as Galileo's work had when he showed us that we weren't the center of the universe. We have a human-centric view of biology that's out of sync with what we know about the way life has progressed over the past 3 billion years.

Do you foresee a time in the near future when everyone in the United States will have his or her own genetic-identification card?

Again, the exact timing of these developments is hard to pin down. I have an unusual curiosity about my genetic makeup -- and I assume that everyone else has a similar curiosity. I can't imagine not wanting to know about the makeup of my own genetic code, or what it might mean in my own life. By knowing my risk of getting a certain type of cancer, for example, I could prevent the onset of that disease. I want to know what my genetic code means for my physiology.

I am betting that the rest of the world shares the kind of curiosity and desire for self-preservation that I have. That hunger for knowledge will make people want to know about their genetic code, and it will allow them to take effective advantage of that knowledge. People are already starting to ask about their genetic makeup, and we hope to make that information available to them within the next few years.

We also have to make sure that we get the technology right so that it works without causing people harm. How can we do that? How can we open up the technology while making sure that information can't be used against people? Who owns your genetic information? Do you own it, or does your insurance company own it? For example, many life-insurance companies have statements in tiny print at the bottom of their application form saying that you must provide them with any information that you have about your health. But if that information is something that you paid for, if it's your own genetic information, are you contractually obligated to deliver that data to your insurance company?

So one outcome is that we end up losing our health insurance?

A lot of people don't realize that we would all become uninsurable very quickly if we knew the construction of our own genetic code. What really needs to happen is the implementation of universal health insurance. We need to get back to a system of shared risk. The way that our system works now means that universal health insurance won't be easy to implement. But it's essential that such a system is put into place. Otherwise, discrimination will become more and more prevalent -- and discrimination will become more and more insidious. We don't necessarily need to have a health plan that's administered by the government, but we do need to have a plan that involves a shared-risk paradigm.

What are the benefits of having your own genetic-information card?