Applera Corporation of Norwalk, Connecticut, at #874 on the 2007 Fortune 1000 list, was one of the largest international biotechnology companies based in the United States.
At that point the remaining Connecticut Life Sciences company issued its two tracking stocks, and also changed its own name to PE Corporation.
[1][2] In the early 1990s, Perkin-Elmer, which had been a maker of diverse electronic instruments and analytical and optical equipment,[5] established strong ties with groups closely involved with the business of decoding the human genome.
James D. Watson, who founded the public consortium, forecast that the project could be completed in 15 years from its 1990 starting date, at a cost of US$3 billion.
[6] The HGP was a public consortium of eight university centers funded through the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust of London.
To meet Human Genome Project goals, Perkin-Elmer developed mapping kits with markers every 10 million bases along each chromosome.
Also that year, DNA fingerprinting using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) became accepted in court as reliable forensic evidence.
It marketed PCR reagents kits in alliance with Hoffman-La Roche Inc.[9] In 1996, Perkin-Elmer acquired Tropix, Inc., a chemiluminescence company, for its life sciences division.
[1][2] Also In 1996, Tony L. White from Baxter International Inc. became president and chief executive officer of Perkin-Elmer and reorganized it into two separate operating divisions, Analytical Instruments and PE Applied Biosystems.
[9] In 1998, Perkin-Elmer acquired PerSeptive Biosystems (formerly Nasdaq: PBIO), a leader in the bio-instrumentation field where it made biomolecule purification systems for protein analysis.
[1][2][5][10] Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., had been the founder, chairman, and CEO of PerSeptive, and after the acquisition he became a senior vice president and chief business officer of Perkin-Elmer.
[11] While planning the next new generation of machines, PE Biosystems' president, Michael W. Hunkapiller, calculated that it would be possible for their own private industry to decode the human genome before the academic consortium could complete it.
[citation needed] Also, it meant that Hunkapiller's idea would require competing against his own customers, to all of whom Applied Biosystems sold its sequencing machines and their chemical reagents.
Perkin-Elmer's interest was driven largely by its monopoly, through the equipment of Applied Biosystems, of the market for automated DNA sequencing machines.
[9] According to Venter, the machine was so revolutionary that it could decode in a single day the same amount of genetic material that most DNA labs could produce in a year.
The machine proved to be so fast that by late March 1999 the consortium announced that it had revised its timeline, and would release by the Spring of 2000 a "first draft sequence" for 80% of the human genome.
[8] Other officers who remained in PE Corporation included William B. Sawch, as senior vice president, general counsel and secretary.
[7] On May 28, 1999, as part of the recapitalization and reorganization, the company completed the sale of its traditional business unit, the Analytical Instruments Division to EG&G Inc., along with the Perkin-Elmer name, for US$425 million.
[16][17] EG&G was based in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and made products for diverse industries including automotive, medical, aerospace and photography.
Celera that year made milestone headlines when it announced that it had completed the sequencing and first assembly of the two largest genomes in history, that of the fruit fly, and of the human.
[9] In 2001, the Applied Biosystems division of Applera reached revenues of US$1.6 billion, and developed a new workstation instrument specifically for the new field of proteomics, which had become Celera's new core business focus, as it shifted away from gene discovery.
Applera CEO Tony L. White had noted earlier that the database business would distract from pharmaceutical development.