Interviewee: John Sulston. Nobel Laureate John Sulston, former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, talks about the competition within the public sequencing effort, and the distraction of the private. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Competition and the media > The race was a distraction)

We had the race anyway, we had the race internally, and part of the thing about running the consortium, the international consortium, was the acceptance of competition. And there's no way, from the moment this lab was born, there was no way that it was going to survive unless we competed with Bob and Eric and everybody else, and they with us, that's how we justify our funding. So competition is inherent obviously, I mean that's the way everybody pushes forward. We had enough of it, we didn't, you know, it didn't help to have more coming from outside, that was a distraction because it was heading off for a different goal which was not really the real thing.

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