Celera Corporation

[2] Originally headquartered in Rockville, Maryland (relocated to Alameda, California), it was established in May 1998 by PE Corporation (later renamed to Applera), with Dr. J. Craig Venter from The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) as its first president.

While at TIGR, Venter and Hamilton Smith led the first successful effort to sequence an entire organism's genome, that of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium.

Celera's approach, which used shotgun sequencing, spurred the public HGP to accelerate its effort and shift its projected timetable from 2005 to 2003.

These critics pointed to the open access policy for gene sequences from the publicly funded Human Genome Project.

A view from the public effort's side is that of Nobel laureate Sir John Sulston in his book The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome.