The other eight backers are retired professor Tricia David, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston, journalist Philip Knightley, Lady Caroline Evans, friend Sarah Saunders, Joseph Farrell, Sarah Harrison and Tracy Worcester.

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But few works, since Francis Picabia's depiction of Marie Laurencin as an imaginary machine, challenge convention as much as the portrait of Sir John Sulston by Marc Quinn, recently unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery.

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The HGP published its draft reading of all the bases and locations of about 30, 000 genes early in 2001, shortly after one of the leading UK scientists on the project, Dr John Sulston, was told he too would receive a knighthood.

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That was anathema to Dr Collins and his British counterpart, John Sulston (who was head of the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Centre, now known as the Sanger Institute, which did about a third of the public project), who wanted genes to be public goods and started racing Celera to stop the firm finding genes first.

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