t must be pretty galling to be a member of the international, collaborative effort to sequence the human genome. Not only does a Johnny-come-lately apparently finish neck and neck, but even those who ought to know better fail to give credit where it is long overdue. There’s an explanation, of course. Several, in fact. Nevertheless, Science Watch ought, perhaps, to apologize unreservedly for a serious omission in the previous two issues.

Two issues ago J. Craig Venter and his colleagues at Celera Genomics stormed into the Hot Papers database at #3 with their sequence of the human genome, privately funded and published in Science (currently paper #2). Of the comparable paper from the publicly funded International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, published in Nature the same week, there was no sign. Nor in the issue before the present one. Strangely, that rang no alarms. Later (prompted by concerns from Nature), Science Watch looked again, and discovered that there was indeed a problem. The Nature paper credits the consortium as a whole, with a "partial list of authors" on the opposite page. So how do you cite it? Some decided to cite the consortium, others "E.S. Lander et al.," and ISI’s database treated them as two separate papers, neither worthy of the Top Ten. Lump them together, something that Science Watch has now been alerted to do, and the consortium’s paper actually pushes Celera’s out of the top slot.

But aside from raising inevitable sniggers about the fallibility of software, this episode also says a lot about the way the press treats science, and vice versa. The Human Genome Project, which was first mooted in 1985, has been plugging away steadily and after the initial brouhaha had slipped off the press’s—and therefore the public’s—radar. Venter has always had a knack for publicity, reflected in the fact that almost any Internet search engine turns up more hits for Venter and Celera than for any version of the human genome project. It is also far easier for the press (this author included) to go to Celera and Venter than to any particular person associated with the public effort. There simply is no single one-stop quote shop for the public project, which has always had to be more "political."

Other factors come into play too. There is the David-and-Goliath aspect of plucky little Celera risking its investors’ money to take on the giant bloated by taxpayers’ funds. There’s the excitement of a race, easier to report than steady progress with few easily understood marker posts and little sense of urgency. There’s the undeniable fact that competition did indeed spur the public effort, which finished considerably quicker than had been forecast before Venter threw down the gauntlet.

Maybe the consortium should be glad that Celera goaded them on. But there is still a considerable amount of ill-feeling. Science and Nature both devoted space to an analysis of the results, and the overall conclusion seems to be that there’s not a lot to choose between them. But the consortium maintains, with some justification, that had it not been for the freely available results from its preliminary mapping efforts Celera would have found it much more difficult to assemble its own sequence. And that makes it even more maddening that Celera has managed to restrict access to its own data.

Every day the consortium adds fresh sequence to databases that are available to all and sundry. Celera delays adding data for up to three months while its partners seek profits in the sequences, and it makes researchers jump through a series of hoops to gain access to usably large chunks of the genome.