For more than a century, Science and Nature, the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, have been stolid, stodgy competitors, pledged to promoting human progress through the reasoned exchange of discoveries, data and ideas.
In recent years, though, the weeklies have been acting more like, well, just another couple of mass-market magazines caught up in a battle for readers and advertisers. Like Time and Newsweek, or People and US, the two journals have intensified their efforts to snare scoops, score coups and trumpet big stories with glitzy marketing and elaborate public relations.
But, now, in the heat of competition over one of the biggest science stories of all time — the completion of the human genetic map — one of the journals may have gone too far.
Both the U.S.-based Science and the British-based Nature hit the stands, so to speak, Monday with identical cover stories: publication of what is said to be the complete biochemical sequence of the human genome, the string of 3 billion units of DNA that make up humankind’s genetic code. But each journal published a slightly different version.
And a growing number of prominent scientists around the world say they fear that the version published by Science will hamstring rather than help future scientific research.
That version was produced by the for-profit Rockville, Md.-based Celera Genomics Corp. Three years ago, the then-newly incorporated Celera shocked the biology world by announcing it was jumping into the effort to sequence the human genome. In so doing, Celera was challenging to a race the official Human Genome Project, a $3 billion, non-profit, government-backed international effort with major centers in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S.
And, although the government project had an eight-year headstart, the result at the finish line was a dead heat, with leaders of the two groups standing together in the White House last June to announce that, three years earlier than expected, they had each completed rough drafts of the genome sequence. Initial plans were for both to publish in Science simultaneously, but, because of concessions Science editors made to Celera, the Human Genome Project backed out. Their findings were published Monday in Nature instead.
What has angered many scientists is the agreement that Science’s editors signed to publish a summary of Celera’s genome version without requiring the company, as has long been the policy at the journal and other scientific periodicals, to provide all researchers with free and unrestricted access to the data employed to build that version.
This, they argue, subverts the central purpose of a scholarly journal and means the Celera paper is little more than an infomercial for the company.
“We understand Celera’s motives in being able to get a great advertisement out of it,” said Ewan Birney, the team leader in genomic annotation at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge, England, part of the Human Genome Project. “We have a problem with Science encouraging this behavior. I’m afraid other people will now go to Science and say: You cut a deal with Celera, why can’t you cut a deal with us?”
Science’s “deal” with Celera has sharpened already strained relations between researchers at Celera and the public genome effort. Eric Lander, director of the Human Genome Project’s largest sequencing center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a main author of that team’s paper, said the journal was wrong to make an exception to its rules for a private company.
“I do think Science magazine has made a serious mistake, and seems to be confused about the basis of scientific publication,” Lander said.
Critics of the arrangement argue that Celera is trying to have it both ways by publishing its data and at the same time protecting it. Previously, private firms that wished to keep their information proprietary were required to exclude that data from publication.
But J. Craig Venter, CEO of Celera and leader of its sequencing team, said the genome is such an important piece of work that he wanted to make his version public in some form. “All the people whining about how we’re doing this, think of how they’d whine if we didn’t do it at all,” Venter said, with the same sort of in-your-face manner — unusual in a scientist — for which he is known.
Science has responded to the criticism by accusing Nature of similar sins. Nature, meanwhile, has gone out of its way to paint itself as the white knight of the moment, with its editor, Philip Campbell, crowing, “We at Nature are delighted to uphold the principle at the heart of the Human Genome Project: free and unrestricted access.”
But the controversy isn’t likely to do much to improve the reputations of either publication.
Robert Waterston, the director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis, a part of the Human Genome Project, noted that a recent e-mail to Science subscribers from editor Donald Kennedy about the upcoming Celera publication read more like “advertising copy” than a balanced scientific evaluation. “I doubt he wrote it,” Waterston said.
He said scientists today routinely joke about Nature and Science as being so interested in pizazz that they’re no longer scholarly journals, and added, “This is a commercialization of [scholarly] publishing. It’s selling magazines.”
In fact, Venter said, “We’ve had journals bidding for our work before we’ve even finished it.”
The Celera issue is complicated by the nature and history of human genetic research.
Recognizing the importance of understanding what makes humans human, genomic researchers have routinely placed the findings of their work in GenBank, an Internet site publicly accessible by anyone, within 24 hours of obtaining their results. So open and cooperative has the process been that researchers now are even able to arrange at GenBank to be notified by e-mail when a gene similar to the one they are studying is sequenced by another scientist.
Such open communication “has been our life blood,” Birney said. “It’s really made this new science possible.”
And, throughout this period, Science and Nature both insisted that their contributors post in GenBank, or at a similarly open site, the data used to reach findings on DNA sequencing.
One exception to this rule, though, has been Celera, founded in May 1998, by Venter, a brilliant scientist-entrepreneur who had participated in the Human Genome Project while at the National Institutes of Health. Although Celera relied upon the project’s daily-posted public data, it kept its own findings private.
That was expected to change, however, after the White House news conference last June 26 at which Celera and the government project announced they had completed rough drafts of the genome, and would publish their results.
Science and Nature each tried to woo both teams, Venter said. The Celera group settled on Science early in the process, Venter said, in part because the journal reaches far more researchers in the U.S. than Nature.
But when Science’s editors began negotiating with the two teams, they ran into a problem. Terms that would satisfy one team were repugnant to the other.
Celera would only submit its paper if it could keep its data at its own Web site and restrict its use by outside researchers, particularly scientists working for other commercial operations. Members of the government project said that, for months, they were given no idea that Celera was demanding concessions that many scientists view as heretical — and that Science was willing to concede them.
When Science finally agreed to the terms in late fall, and revealed them to the government team, the Human Genome Project took a walk, deciding to place its study in Nature as a protest, according to journal editors and numerous scientists.
A copy of the contract supplied last week by Science contained language unusual for a scholarly journal. It read in part, “Science shall maintain the Celera Data in confidence and shall not disclose it to any other party except as permitted under this agreement.”
Kennedy defended the magazine’s decision to publish. In an editorial in last week’s edition, he asserted that many other journals, including Nature, have printed articles with restrictions on access to data. (Nature editors denied having done so.) He also said in an interview, “The public benefit in putting that sequence out there — instead of being a trade secret — is worth what is an inconvenience [for researchers] but not disabling [to their research efforts].”
Many scientists, including one writing a commentary in Monday’s Science, argue that Celera’s data will be virtually unusable by researchers in bioinformatics, a new field that integrates computer science with molecular biology. Such researchers take huge genetic databases and compare them to others, to find genes that humans have in common with other species, for example.
“The field of genomics is about looking at the forest rather than the trees,” said David S. Roos, the University of Pennsylvania biologist who is author of the Science commentary, in an interview.
By its nature, bioinformatics depends on free access to data and merging different databases, to make comparisons as new questions arise. But a key element in the restrictions on the Celera data states that its database cannot be merged with others.
“Bioinformatic researchers can’t take all of that data and combine it with other data and create something new,” Roos noted. “They can’t re-post it on the Web.”
That’s bad enough, but scientists fear that, based on this precedent, many other databases in the future will be restricted. That could lead to “the Balkanization of data,” Birney said.
Despite his criticism of Science, Lander said he still respects the journal.
“I have nothing against Science; it’s not like I wouldn’t publish in Science someday in the future,” Lander said.
But, he added, “Between two equally good journals, we chose the one that stood for the tradition of scientific publication. [It] wasn’t a hard choice.”
