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Fears that Britain is about to lose its prize genome project to the
US may have been overstated. John Sulston, the project’s joint leader at
the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in
Cambridge, has decided to stay in Britain rather than accept an offer from
an American industrialist to join a private DNA-sequencing company.

Sulston’s main reason, he says, is his increased confidence in the British
side of the venture. He has also decided there are important differences
between his approach and that of the industrialist, Frederick Bourke. Sulston
is also unhappy about antagonistic remarks made recently by Bourke about
Nobel prizewinner James Watson.

Sulston and Robert Waterston, of the University of Washington, St Louis,
are joint leaders of an Anglo-American project to sequence the DNA of the
nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. The project has been seen as the centrepiece
of British genome research and will contribute to the much greater international
effort to sequence the human genome.

Earlier this year it emerged that Bourke had invited the two scientists
to join him in a private venture to sequence DNA on an industrial scale
(This Week, 1 February and 8 February). Sulston’s departure would have effectively
ended Britain’s share of the project.

Sulston told New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ last week that he has ‘no plans’ to join
Bourke’s company. ‘It’s unlikely that Bob or I will go,’ he said. His principal
reason is that ‘the excitement level is going up here’. An application for
an extra £2 million a year from the MRC is believed to be ‘progressing
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Sulston has also concluded that he and Bourke disagree on fundamental
issues. Sulston had always insisted that the sequence information should
be in the public domain, but it has become clear, he says, that this would
not be possible.

Sulston is angered by criticisms that Bourke has reportedly made of
Nobel prizewinner James Watson. Watson resigned as head of the US genome
research effort earlier this month.

‘I don’t like the denigration of Watson that I have seen reported,’
says Sulston. ‘I don’t like Bourke’s attitude towards him.’ In March, Bourke
wrote to the director of the National Institutes of Health, Bernardine Healy.
Bourke reportedly complained that Watson had threatened ‘all-out war’ if
Bourke attempted to poach Sulston and Waterston for his company. A spokesman
at the NIH confirmed this. As New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ went to press, Watson was declining
to give interviews and Bourke had not returned telephone calls.

Sulston and the director of the LMB, Nobel-prizewinner Aaron Klug, are
keen to correct the false impression created by certain news reports that
they owe their promised extra funding entirely to Watson’s visit to the
MRC in February. ‘The bid for that money was already in, in the early autumn.
Watson didn’t initiate it,’ says Sulston.