The fly sequence was completed in record time, thanks to unusual cooperation between government-funded sequencers and a private biotech firm, Celera Genomics. “Biologists got the sequence 18 months earlier than they would have otherwise,” says Gerald Rubin, director of the University of California, Berkeley, fly lab that did much of the work. Scientists hoped the fly collaboration would serve as a model for human-genome sequencing efforts, but Celera and the public Human Genome Project haven’t been able to agree on data-sharing and publication protocols. Unless they learn to make nice, humans will be playing catch-up with flies for months to come.
