Friday 15 May 1998
Cold Spring Harbor was a place for theatre. Jim Watson delighted in creating unpredictable mixtures of people and in slipping surprise sessions into the conference timetable. He had done so this morning, announcing an extra event first thing devoted to the genome crisis. Michael Morgan, primed with coffee, stepped up to the microphone in front of the three hundred packed seats of the main auditorium and prepared to solve the little problem of emphasis. To summon up the ghost of Winston Churchill. To slay ’em in the aisles, to preach the righteous word, to thump a tub. Whatever it took to get the message across and to push down with all the Trust’s weight on the public end of the wobbling balance of opinion.
Unlike the leaders of the public project in America, who had been forced to smile and equivocate and stand next to Venter at photocalls, he spoke without constraint or apology. And the audience paid close attention. Many of them had picked up one of the photocopied handouts which were scattered round the hall and had learned from it the electrifying fact that, in this bubble-era year of 1998, the assets of the Wellcome Trust – obscure and English and far-off as it might be – were worth in excess of $25 billion. Twenty-five billion dollars. That was a fortune on the same scale as Bill Gates’s. That was well over a hundred times as much money as the seemingly gigantic sum that the Perkin-Elmer Corporation had put at Craig Venter’s disposal. And none of it, not one penny of it, was subject to the US Congress or the Bayh-Dole Act. It was all available to back up the strategy being announced down at the whiteboard by this angry, ruddy, genial British guy, who talked as if the option they almost all preferred, down in their scientific hearts, was not lost after all. Certainly they listened. An enraged altruist with $25 billion in his pocket is a person to listen to.
The Wellcome Trust, he said, was the largest charity in the world. It had been committed since 1992, he said, to the international collaboration known as the Human Genome Project. In fact, next to the federal government of the United States of America, the Trust was the HGP’s biggest source of funding. And the Trust supported the HGP because it believed in the aims of the project, as decided in Bermuda between all the principal participants: to identify the genetic code of humanity to the highest practical degree of accuracy, and to make it freely available in the public domain, so as to increase the effectiveness of biomedical research everywhere. The Trust, he said, was proud that its participation had enabled Dr John Sulston of the Sanger Centre in the UK, and his colleagues, to generate a full one third of all the human-sequence data that had been produced so far anywhere. It was proud that, along with the University of Washington in St Louis, the Sanger Centre had taken the leading role in the project.
But this week, he said, a commercial venture had declared its intention to produce a sequence of the human genome. It would not be a complete sequence, just a partial one, thanks to the method the company would use. It would not be released promptly: the company’s announcements, contradictory though they were in some ways, had at least made it clear there’d be delays. And when it was available, it would not be freely available. It had been made clear that exclusive rights to patent parts of it would be claimed. Therefore, he said crisply, although it might provide some complementary information, the new venture would not fulfil the aims of the international Human Genome Project. And it was unthinkable that this less satisfactory effort should be allowed to displace something as important as the HGP. The Wellcome Trust, he said, still believed firmly in free release. It still believed firmly that the human genome should be sequenced as speedily, accurately and completely as possible, through international collaboration. To that end, the Trust had pressed ahead with a major increase in the funding of the Sanger Centre. As of Wednesday, the Trust had doubled its investment in the Sanger to a total of around £200 million, or $350 million. The Trust was now committed to funding 30 per cent of the whole genome. The Trust, of course, was confident that this decision would inspire a similar commitment in the United States. After all, he said – bringing out the word that scientists regard as the A-bomb of all negative judgements – it seemed to him that to leave the production of fundamental scientific data to a company that had to make money out of it would be completely and utterly stupid. The Trust was therefore sure that the international collaboration would proceed.
But in case there was any doubt, he said, he wished to make it clear that 30 per cent of the genome did not represent the outer limit of the Trust’s commitment. This was too important for hesitation, too important for half measures. The Trust would pay any price, bear any burden. The Trust was willing to deploy the whole of its resources if necessary. (Twenty-five billion dollars, he didn’t have to say. Twenty-five billion dollars, O my brothers and O my sisters.) One way or another, the public project would survive. The Trust was going to pay for 30 per cent. But if 30 per cent wasn’t enough, the Trust would pay for 50 per cent of the genome to be sequenced in Britain. It was already exploring ways and means, he said. And if 50 per cent wasn’t enough, the Wellcome Trust would pay any amount more that was necessary. If it had to, it would pay 100 per cent. It would present the world with the whole damn thing, wrapped and ribboned, as a gift from the British. Whatever happened, there was that guarantee. Oh – and if anyone had any questions, they were most welcome to come up afterwards and ask them.
Michael Morgan sat down. He had not once mentioned mice. The three hundred scientists in the Cold Spring Harbor auditorium, anarchists included, began to applaud. And applaud. And applaud. John Sulston popped up. ‘This makes it certain’, he cried, ‘that the genome will be completed within the lifetime of a certain person.’ And he indicated Jim Watson. The audience rose to its collective scientific feet – and stamped them on the cherrywood parquet as it clapped, as it shouted out its approval.
Nicholas Wade, present at Cold Spring Harbor in order to be in at the death of the public project, started drafting a different story for the Sunday Times. ‘INTERNATIONAL GENE PROJECT GETS LIFT. The politics of the human genome project … have suddenly become more complicated, on both a personal and international level …’
*
Wellcome did not have to make good on its guarantee. The existence of the guarantee was enough, along with the force of the Trust’s vote of confidence at that place, at that moment, at that precise point when the public project was trembling in the balance. Francis Collins returned to Washington determined to extract the resources from Congress which he needed to scale up the US labs in order to do the other 70 per cent of the genome in the public domain. And he succeeded, standing his ground through a succession of vitriolic hearings during which he could never speak as freely as his British colleagues. At the end of May 1998, the heads of the five biggest public labs, thereafter known as the G5, agreed to set the rough-draft-first strategy in motion.
And the contest with the Ventapiller began. It took years, and all the way through there were pitfalls that might have been fatal. There were ways to hell even from the gates of heaven, as it says in The Pilgrim’s Progress; there was always a way to slip up until the very moment when the trumpet sounded for you on the other side of the Celestial City’s wall. The scale-up to the new speed permitted by the capillary sequencers did not go easily for the Sanger Centre as it turned out, and it was performed under the remorseless critical eye of the rest of the sequencing community the whole time, for the number of bases the Sanger was releasing daily could not be fudged. The figures were utterly transparent, and anyone could take them and calculate exactly how well John Sulston and Jane Rogers were, or were not, keeping to schedule. Celera (as it was now called) loaded its unmapped, unfinished pieces of sequence into its subscription-only database and constantly announced to the world that it had more bases on offer – as it should have done, because the company was taking all the public data, since it was public, and adding it to its own. Constantly, the Clinton White House put pressure on Francis Collins to show that the two sides were actually working together. This necessitated a n
ew, tactful negotiation every time to bring out in an uncontentious way how incompatible the sides were. And there had to be vigilance, right through 1998 and 1999 into the spring of 2000, to head off any freelance deal-making by colleagues on the public side who got tempted. Clinton and Blair chose a completely arbitrary day to declare that the race was a draw. On 26 June 2000, a date conveniently free in both their diaries, the President and the Prime Minister said that a draft of the sequence was ‘complete’. The public project had by then mapped 97 per cent of the genome, sequenced 85 per cent, and finished 24 per cent; Celera, with the benefit of public and private data merged together, claimed it had sequenced 99 per cent, but it was impossible to verify that figure. (Finishing the genome to the archival standards the Sanger insisted on lay much further ahead and wouldn’t happen until the spring of 2003.) Finally, another row had to be endured in February 2001 over a politically inspired plan for Celera and the public project to publish the sequence jointly. When it became unavoidably plain that Craig Venter didn’t want to reveal actual data and saw the publication process as a last-minute opportunity to secure all the results for Celera’s database, negotiations broke down. Two separate scientific papers appeared: the public one in Nature, the private one in the American journal Science, which controversially decided to allow Venter to claim the great discovery without quite specifying what it consisted of.
But at every stage, the Sanger Centre and its sister labs moved fast enough to stay in the same rough zone of completed sequence as Celera and therefore to deny Celera the chance of any meaningful monopoly. The human genome did not become a proprietary preserve. Subscribing to Celera’s database became an option, not a necessity; and not enough people took the option up. Having lost a cumulative total of about $750 million, the company took a hard look at itself in the sombre, chastened, post-bubble January of 2002, and declared that it was shifting out of the genome database business. Craig Venter resigned as president. It was not by any means at all the end of private-sector interest in the field. All over the world, in ways that John Sulston couldn’t help but find corrupt, university departments and biotech start-ups competed like crazy to distil cash value from the next round of inquiry – from the proteome, from antibodies, from RNAi, from the single-nucleotide polymorphisms which distinguish human individuals from one another. Sulston retired from the Sanger Centre in October 2000, citing ‘the changing environment of biology today’, in which ‘my instinctive reactions are becoming less and less appropriate’. But the basic information of the genome, the fundamental dataset defining humanity, was free and universally available, and it always would be.
And this would not have happened without John Sulston and Michael Morgan. They took the inherited wealth of the British past and they used the force of it just at the spot where it was enough to make a difference. Because of what the Wellcome Trust and the Sanger Centre did, the history of the world is permanently altered. It was the most important technological intervention anyone in Britain made in the whole second half of the twentieth century – although the people who did it weren’t technologists, exactly. It was the most significant engineering achievement – although they weren’t engineers.
As I said goodbye to John Sulston on the steps of the Wellcome Trust, with the traffic roaring by in the dusk, he suddenly stopped. ‘We really did it. I said that to Jane the other day – “We really did it, didn’t we?” – and she said, “Yes, John. We really did.”’
And the trumpets sounded for them on the other side.
Six
The Art of Falling
Rewind thirty-odd years. In the autumn of 1971, about a month after the British engineers at Woomera put their sad satellite Prospero into orbit on Black Arrow, an object appeared in the Martian sky. A global dust storm was blowing on Mars, and the normal dull pink of the heavens over the great crater of Hellas had turned to a streaky, racing brown. The object came on. It was a Soviet probe, massive and solid, 1,210 kilos of steel and rocketry in a package shaped like a squashed diving bell. For six months it had cruised across the interplanetary vacuum, attached to an even stouter, even heavier module which was now settling into Mars orbit overhead. Then, four and a half days ago, it had separated from the orbiter and been hurled free on a course leading straight into the racing duststorm.
Earth was nearly 400 million kilometres away. It took a radio signal fourteen minutes to cover the distance, too long a delay for instructions from home to control what happened now. Mars 2, as the probe was called, was on its own, running its stored program for the descent according to its onboard clock. The first traces of atmosphere it met were mere outriding particles, an infinitesimal thickening in the parts-per-million count normal to empty space. But Mars 2 was still moving at the speed of its interplanetary transfer, angling in south-eastwards across the murky face of the planet at 20,000 kilometres per hour. The density rose quickly. Gas molecules started to bang into the heat shield, first a stray few, then more, then more, a probabilistic bombardment getting heavier and heavier. Mars’ atmosphere is a thin veil of carbon dioxide, only one one-hundred-and-fiftieth as thick as Earth’s at the planet’s surface. But it’s enough of an atmosphere for winds to blow, like the winds presently lofting dust seventy kilometres high in one almighty planet-wide feedback loop. On calmer days, it’s enough to float delicate white clouds of water-ice crystals high above the dry valleys of the maroon wilderness. It’s enough for weather. And so it’s enough to put up serious resistance when a squashed diving bell weighing a metric tonne hurtles into it. Mars 2’s lower shell changed from dirty white to pale cherry, then warmed to scarlet. It glowed. The friction of the atmosphere was turning the probe’s speed into heat, throwing off velocity in a ferocious thermal bleed. It came on. And as it juddered and scorched its way down through the roiling brown mess all around, something returned that had been missing ever since it left Earth: sound. For 400 million kilometres there had been deep, calm silence. Now there was the high, eerie whippoorwill whistling of the storm, never recorded, never witnessed by any human ear, far fainter than any wind would be in the thick air of Earth, and in the midst of it, tracking down, the Doppler-shifting rumble of Mars 2’s own passage.
The plan was that when the heatshield had slowed the probe to 1,200 kph or so, petals on the top would flip back, releasing a parachute. Mars 2 would lurch as if someone had slammed on the brakes, allowing the heatshield to be discarded and fall free. Then, dangling under the canopy, still hurtling downwards in comparison to any parachute descent on Earth, yet slowed to the tiniest fraction of its original speed, the probe would fire retro-rockets in its base and descend the last few hundred metres to a slow, deliberate landing. Engines off. Extend antenna. Comrade Brezhnev’s compliments to all concerned.
No one knows at which exact stage things went wrong. The last thing mission control heard for sure was that the parachute had deployed, and after that Mars 2 was incommunicado. Perhaps the parachute released too early, when the speed was still too great, and was ripped from its mounting by the slipstream. Perhaps the dust rushing by at 1,200 kph scoured through the parachute lines or the fabric. Perhaps the probe lost attitude control and tumbled. No one knows; it happened on another planet, and nobody was watching.
But whatever the cause was, the probe did not slow. It kept on coming. It flashed over the Hellespontus mountains which border Hellas – jagged red peaks just glimpsed through the curtain of dust – and out across the tumbled dunelands of the enormous crater’s floor, another eight kilometres further down. Mars 2 bored through the murk, still at its pre-parachute velocity of 1,200 kph, a parcel of careful human contrivances gone way out of human reach. Twenty seconds later, the dust thinned to an instant’s view of cold desert, and at 45° south, 302° west, Martian latitude and longitude, Mars 2 struck, so fast and so hard that the aeroshell built by the Lavochkin factory, and the mass spectrometer, and the camera, and the soil scoop, and the shield bearing the coat of arms of the Soviet Union, smashed to fragments as
if they had exploded from within, and little bits of steel rained down in a wide circle around the main crash site. Some pieces rolled. Then they all lay still, soot-stained and broken on the cinnamon sand.
*
There are far more wrecks on the Martian surface than intact spacecraft. From Soviet disasters in the early 1970s to the amazing crescendo of thuds, splats and wallops organised by NASA in the late 1990s, the large majority of missions to land on Mars have failed. Even superpowers can’t do it easily, in the absence of the kind of comic-book technology that allowed Dan Dare and Digby to swoop around the solar system. It’s the physics.
The problem of getting something down from space is the exact opposite of the problem of getting something up there. The higher an object is positioned in a planet’s gravity well, the more energy it has in relation to the planet. In fact, you can think of a particular height as representing a particular energy level. To climb up to it, you have to put that amount of energy in. To descend from it, you have to take exactly the same amount of energy out. Both ways around, if you value the preservation of the object you’re moving, you want the energy transfer to happen smoothly and continuously. The resource that has permitted smooth ascents to space is the rocket engine, in all its different forms and configurations. When the godfathers of Prospero sent their baby skywards, David Andrews’ brazed engine bells, John Scott-Scott’s twirling turbopumps and Jim Scragg’s airframe were all acting together as a mechanism by which the chemical energy in HTP and kerosene could be gradually imparted to the satellite. Over five and a half minutes or thereabouts, the contents of the fuel tank and oxidiser tank were converted steadily into motion, until Prospero had become energetic enough to stay in orbit. Rocket fuels vary; engine designs vary; vehicle aerodynamics vary. The hope of the space industry is that somebody someday will devise a combination of fuel, engine and vehicle that makes going up cost only a little more than going along does. The aerospike engine looked promising for a while. Scramjets are presently under investigation. Speculation about lasers comes and goes. John Scott-Scott and a group of other British rocketmen have designed an eighty-two-metre-long space-plane clad in midnight black ceramics, and named it Skylon, after the giant futuristic sculpture at the Festival of Britain. But basically there’s one means of getting upstairs, in many different varieties.
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