Dr Venter said Celera had filed a preliminary patent application on this particular whole gene.
Dr Venter therefore found himself with more time on his hands than he had been planning.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, and see which one wins Dr Venter's Grand Prix.
Dr Venter, however, has succeeded in engineering a secretion pathway from another organism into experimental algae.
Its boss, Yang Huangming, is certainly the peer of people like Dr Venter, Dr Lander and Dr Collins.
ECONOMIST: The next advances in genomics may happen in China
Dr Venter, too, left the NIH in the wake of the expressed-sequence-tag incident.
Dr Venter said he thinks Celera's tentative approach to patent filings makes sense.
The ETC Group says it will be writing to Dr Venter asking him to withdraw his institute's patent applications.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Patent sought on 'synthetic life'
The genetic sequences of prokaryotes, by contrast, are obtained by a process called whole-genome shotgunning, which Dr Venter has pioneered.
Dr Hunkapiller who, unlike Dr Venter, has spent much of his career in industry, is a slightly less well-known figure.
Dr Venter first announced that scientists were working on creating synthetic life forms at a conference in California in 1999.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Patent sought on 'synthetic life'
So Dr Venter changed tack, and decided to go with a lightly modified version of the entire M. genitalium genome.
In order to sequence Haemophilus, Dr Venter used a more direct approach.
Dr Venter maintains that artificial life forms could produce solutions to global problems such as green sources of fuel and climate change.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Patent sought on 'synthetic life'
Dr Venter also expressed concern that the mouse work would divert the NIH team from completing its version of the human genome.
Dr Venter believes this represents about a third of the human genome, and hopes to be finished by April 2000 at the latest.
Since publication precludes patenting (or, depending on the country involved, reserves any patent rights to the publisher), it should stymie Celera and Dr Venter.
Dr Venter, a veteran of biotechnological scraps ranging from gene patenting to the private human-genome project, has been interested in bioenergy for a long time.
The watermark, Dr Venter says, includes a cipher which contains the URL of a website and three quotations, if you can work out how to decode it.
Dr Venter reckons that even with existing technology, it should be possible to turn out ten times more fuel per hectare than can be garnered from maize.
"The panel was impressed by Dr Venter's appeal for assistance with his conduct in the future and his desire to avoid future clashes with the authorities, " read an RFU statement.
Dr Venter's was the real McCoy: when he put the viral DNA into host cells they started to spit out new viruses just as self-destructively as cells infected with the natural Phi-X174.
The two failed to see eye to eye, though, and Dr Venter went on to help create a second firm, Celera, in the hope of beating the public project to the human genome.
But Mr Shreeve paints Dr Venter more as a man who started out believing in public access to such riches, but got caught up in corporate interests which eventually forced him out of Celera.
His company, modestly named Synthetic Genomics (and based, unlike the others, on the east side of America, in Rockville, Maryland), is reluctant to discuss details, but Dr Venter, too, is taken with the pharmaceutical analogy.
Besides lighting a fire under the public side of the project, this technique enabled Dr Venter and his collaborators to publish the first complete genetic sequence of a living organism, a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae.
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Dr Venter was working out his frustrations after having been fired in 2002 from Celera Genomics, a company he helped set up in 1998 with the specific aim of sequencing the human genome faster and better than the public Human Genome Project was managing at the time.
Although patents on single genes now face legal challenges, Dr. Venter said he intends to patent his experimental cells.
But Dr Craig Venter, the president of Celera, said in a newspaper interview on Friday that his company had already sequenced the genomes of three different strains of mice, two of them to 90% completion, and was perplexed by the new public initiative.
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