Interviewee: Eric Lander. Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, talks about his views on a competing genome project and its effect on funding. (DNAi Location: Genome > The Project > Players > Money > Deliberately trying to kill funding?)

And the real concern was that all of the hype around the idea, attractive as it sounded, that oh public projects were so inefficient, couldn't get things done, the private sector would know how to do everything better, would somehow be used deliberately or inadvertently, but I think we thought deliberately, to try to kill funding for a public project. Because the only way you could make a business plan work for making a proprietary database of the human genome was to ensure that the long-standing public plans for more than a decade to build toward making the sequence of the human genome, were stopped. That was the only way that a proprietary database would have value.

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