The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Venter and Smith launched the Haemophilus project in the winter of 1993. By July 1995, it was complete. “The final [paper] took forty drafts,” Venter later wrote. “We knew this paper was going to be historic, and I was insistent that it be as near perfect as possible.” It was a marvel: the Stanford geneticist Lucy Shapiro wrote about how members of her lab had stayed up all night reading the H. flu genome, “thrilled by the first glimpse at the complete gene content of a living species.” There were genes to generate energy, genes to make coat proteins, genes to manufacture proteins, to regulate food, to evade the immune system. Sanger himself wrote to Venter to describe the work as “magnificent.”