Instead, the story of Sir John's work on the international human genome project is portrayed through his gene structure.

ECONOMIST: The face of portraiture: Making a splash | The

The central struggle was between the publicly funded international Human Genome Project, led by Francis Collins, a distinguished scientist and devout Christian, which pursued a slow-and-steady approach to sequencing until Celera, a private company led by Craig Venter, appeared on the scene and boldly claimed that its revolutionary new technique, whole-genome shot-gun sequencing, could do the job in less than half the time.

ECONOMIST: Medical research

Rival descriptions of the human genome were published by Celera Genomics , a private company, and the Human Genome Project , an international government-backed consortium, in rival scientific publications.

ECONOMIST: Record breaking

The BGI began in 1999, when Dr Yang muscled his way into the human-genome project, cornering part of the tip of chromosome three (about 1% of the total human genome) as the Chinese contribution to that international project.

ECONOMIST: The next advances in genomics may happen in China

It is also involved in the International HapMap Project, a five-country initiative launched in October, to follow up the Human Genome Project with a large-scale study of human genetic variation and its relation to disease.

ECONOMIST: Chinese biotechnology

From this humble beginning it now plans to sequence 200 full human genomes as part of an international collaboration called the 1, 000-genome project.

ECONOMIST: The next advances in genomics may happen in China