Finally, the Book of Life and Instructions for Navigating It

摘要

Beaming at each other, longtime rivals Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter shook hands in the East Room of the White House on 26 June as they declared joint victory—and announced an implicit truce—in their race to decipher the "book of life." President Clinton presided over the event, attended by a stellar cast of genome scientists, a few members of Congress, and a handful of foreign ambassadors, to celebrate completion of the "first survey of the entire human genome ... the most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." In fact, neither one's team has completely deciphered the human genome—that is, determined the exact order of all 3.12 billion or 3.15 billion bases, depending upon whom you ask, that make up our DNA.