Who’ll Get Credit Is Issue Even Before Code Is Broken

Even before Celera Genomics and the public Human Genome Project announce that they have completed the first versions of the human genetic code, there is a dispute brewing over who will get scientific credit.

Specifically, editors at the prestigious journal Science are now struggling over whether to publish Celera’s results over the objections of some scientists in the Human Genome Project.

Scientists from the public project are already at work on papers about their “working draft” that will likely be published in Science and its British counterpart, Nature, in midsummer, several researchers have said.

At issue for Celera is how it will release a database that will list in order most of the 3 billion chemical building blocks or letters that make up the entire human genetic code--the human genome. Electronic access to such data is now considered an essential part of publishing research on human and other genomes.

Celera officials declined The Times’ requests for interviews. Celera’s president and chief scientific officer, J. Craig Venter, has said repeatedly that he will make the company’s raw data available to scientists at no cost and without seeking to share in any patentable discoveries that might result.

But Celera is so far unwilling to make its sequence available through GenBank--a public database managed by a federal agency, the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Instead, scientists will have to go to Celera’s Internet site to get the data.

And there will be one restriction, Venter told members of the House subcommittee on energy and environment last month: “The only protection that we have indicated that we would seek is database protection, as exists in Europe, to inhibit other database companies from selling the Celera database.”

It is still unclear how the company will enforce this limitation, and that’s what troubles some research scientists with the Human Genome Project, who have lodged protests with editors at Science.

“GenBank plays a critical role,” said Dr. Robert H. Waterston, director of the Washington University School of Medicine gene sequencing center. “It allows anybody to take that sequence and redistribute it and do with it as they want. . . . The standard is GenBank.”

Waterston also questions whether Celera should be able to incorporate data from the public genome effort in any paper, even if it cites the source of the information.

The decision on whether to publish a Celera paper could fall to Donald Kennedy, the former Stanford University president and biology professor who will become editor in chief of Science on June 1.

“I don’t know enough to comment intelligently, but I’m learning as fast as I can,” Kennedy said in a recent interview. “I’m very hopeful that the issues here will be resolved and there’s time for resolution.”

Nature’s biology editor Richard Gallagher declined to say whether his publication has been in discussion with Celera about publishing a paper.

Gallagher pointed to an editorial that described Nature’s policy calling for genome data to be “deposited in a reliable, publicly available, unrestricted and free database.”