Interviewee: Craig Venter. Craig Venter, leader of the private effort at Celera Genomics, speaks about the excitement the race to sequence the human genome generated. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Competition and the media > It got these guys off their butts)

I think the fact that it was perceived as a race certainly got these guys off their butts and I don't think they would have otherwise. They would have kept going at their leisurely pace. They did not feel an urgency or a public need to get this information to people that needed it. I don't, that I don't understand, and I never will. It was a race against, you know, the little guy with the new idea against the massive public government infrastructure. People like those kind of races particularly in the UK and in the US. But it made people interested in the genome project, and there's not a country I've been able to visit around the world without them knowing about it and being excited about it and being excited about the implications of it. So in that sense I think it's probably the best thing that ever could have happened to science, you know, I wish it could have been done without the base human emotions that accompanied it at every stage.

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