Umm... (Score 1)

For what it is worth, the laws of both the US and England require that the information be made public because public research money was used to fund the project. Additionally, the projected was chartered to make all of the information publicly available.

At issue before was whether or not Craig Venter and Celera Genomics were going to release their version publically and their annotations (which they probably won't), and whether Venter has any intellectual property on which he can obtain patents (which he probably doesn't).

Celera currently has sequence which are not part of the public record sequence yet, but will be shortly. Celera's sequence is badly fragmented and since Celera currently uses shotgun seuencing alone, they're probably having some trouble anchoring the sequence fragments and finishing it, something they won't be able to do before the public effort (but that they could partly do now by using the public information -- greatly decreasing their IP position).

Finally, the Human Genome Project has additional iimportant informations regarding allelic variation and single-nucleotide polymorphisms obtained through sequencing multiple people's DNA as opposed to Celera's ostensibly quicker approach of sequencing the DNA of a single person (Craig Venter himself). I'd really be amazed if Celera will see mcuh profit from its human genome sequencing effort.

Anyway, the point was that the HGP information was always destined to be released into the public domain, there wasn't even a question about it. It's nice for Clinton and Blair to take credit for it, but they didn't do anything. Release of the information still won't cover IP related to genes not identified or detrimental genetic mutations/ variants that cause disease, the majority of which the HGP will not capture. However, the HGP information will make such things far easier to find in the future.