NIH and DOE: Interagency Territorialism

The Human Genome Project was plagued with small groups and individuals staking and defending their territory of the genome and funding to the detriment of the program as a whole. With the importance of high performance computing and the centralized organization required to beat Craig Venter, the National Labs were particularly well placed to handle the human genome. However, the Department of Energy’s proposal was summarily rejected as “a program for unemployed bomb makers” rather than because the NIH and academic labs were better positioned for the undertaking. In fact, Collins later restructured the American labs to better organize and structure sequencing efforts. Running the public project in such a deliberately inefficient way inevitably invited competition and jeopardized the central aim of ensuring the open access to the code of human life.

The “Unemployed Bombmakers,” as Borstein refers to DOE scientists, should have been no less capable of sequencing the human genome due to their backgrounds. Additionally, for the scaling and computing aspects of the project, they would have been especially well positioned given the history of the National Labs in scaling uranium production for the Manhattan Project and the DOE’s emphasis on high performance computing. In fact, Celera’s centralized approach emphasizing computing allowed it to catch up with the public project in one-third the time for one-tenth the cost. That the DOE’s efforts were disregarded so briskly implied professional tribalism as opposed to the due consideration warranted by a project of such magnitude. Another example of this tribalism came when Cox considered joining Celera, Collins made it explicitly clear that he had to choose one or the other because nobody would work with him if he joined Celera and that his lab’s funding would cease.

While the DOE served as part of the Human Genome Project, it continued to play second fiddle to the NIH. When the DOE and Celera were close to the memorandum of understanding which would have allowed for collaboration between the two organizations, the NIH interfered to end such a prospect rather than legitimize either the DOE or Celera as major players. As the public project continued and formed its own network of nonprofits and private partnerships, the number of independent sequencing labs continued to dwindle reforming the diffuse initial effort into the concentrated program the DOE had initially envisioned.

"Over the lifetime of the project, the main struggle was not the superficial conflict between public and private research efforts, but the deeper matter of staking the field of genomics as territory explicitly under the NIH rather than the DOE or Celera. As much as the DOE tried to build itself up in the field such as the memorandum with Celera, the NIH continued to push it down. When Celera was close to public trading, the NIH coordinated the SNP nonprofit to weaken its competition. In short, big science really does invite big egos.

References:

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World.  New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.