William Haseltine speaks

About the genetic evolution he helped instigate

William Haseltine did an odd thing at two speaking engagements on consecutive days. What was odd was that he delivered a 3½ hour talk in Minneapolis without the use of notes or slides, including a bravura hour-long Q&A, in which the answers were as poised as his planned remarks. (No one does that.) Then ... the next day, he delivered, in Detroit to a similar group, an address that was 95% different material. Neither group was aware of this discrepancy. But I have listened to both sets of tapes, was amazed at this, and want to communicate it to you.

Most of us, when we hear the words human and genome, we rush to finish the phrase with the word project. The government-sponsored project to map the entire human genetic structure received wide publicity over the past two years, and many of us came to equate this mapping with the imminent discovery of countless cures for gene-based diseases and defects.

The Human Genome Project would be the Rosetta Stone that would point medicine toward a complete understanding of human heritance.
That's great. But the Human Genome Project, while world-famous, is not the final word on the topic of genetic medicine. A parallel operation, funded not by the National Institutes of Health but (originally) by the Department of Energy and later by venture capital, has been doing parallel work that may yield greater dividends. That company's name: Human Genome Sciences. Its founder and eminent figure: Bill Haseltine.

He sought to educate us on the two approaches, and provide a glimpse into one of the entrepreneurial wonders of the age.

Whatever you call Bill Haseltine, founder of Human Genome Sciences, don't call him a geneticist.

He went to great length in his Detroit talk to delineate the differences between the genetics approach of the upper-case Human Genome Project with his company's lower-case counterpart.

He started his explanation at the molecular level. From the time of Mendel it was known that "like begot like, and different begot different" -- the core truth of genetic science. But it was not until Nobel-winners Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA in the 1950s that people understood that genetic schemes are encrypted at the molecular level in complex ropes of biological information. It was one of the great scientific syntheses of all time, rating (in Haseltine's view, certainly) with the breakthroughs of Einstein and Copernicus.

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Bill Haseltine