[Greta Van Susteren, Cnn Legal Analyst:] Let me interrupt for a second. We're going to go to a genome event here in Washington. Let's listen.
[Craig Venter, Celera Genomics:] And as I said earlier, I'm delighted that Francis Collins made such a tremendous effort to help build good cooperation in this community. And I thank in particular Ari Patrinos, who was sort of the master of ceremonies for getting us together, leading to this cooperation. So today, Celera is announcing that it has sequenced 99 percent of the human genome. We have 3.12 billion letters of genetic code that have been assembled using our unique algorithms developed by the scientific team here. I'll be making various introductions later on, but this is a historic moment, I think, for private industry, that the risk of capital at a time when the strategy we had was deemed to be too risky for other types of funding. I want to introduce to you, particularly acknowledge Tony White, who's the chairman and CEO of PE Corporation. Tony, if you'd stand up. If Tony White had not been willing along with Mike Hunkapiller of PE Biosystems to take a risk of investment to form Celera I certainly would not be standing here today. And the tremendous equipment that Mike Hunkapiller's team produced are clearly responsible for both teams being at the point they are today. And so this is clearly a triumph for both public funding and private funding that had both had not happened the human genome would still be a very long way off. We described in our press release and I'll be talking about it more in a few minutes about some new cloning methods that our team developed to get to this point even faster, and they're exciting developments in science. We'd like to say that we have members of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry here that are using...
[Francis Collins, National Institutes Of Health:] Well, I'd like to add my welcome also to all of you who are here at this historic press conference and particularly to express my gratitude to Ari Patrinos for the important role he's played in helping to organize this coordinated announcement today and also serving as our emcee. I don't think we should go any further today without reintroducing at least one person who's in the room whose contribution to the very idea of the genome project made it happen back there some years ago and who continues to play an enormously important role in urging this effort forward with all due speed. So can I ask Jim Watson to maybe stand up and be recognized?
[Van Susteren:] We've been listening to the participants of the Human Genome Project. Earlier today, it was announced about 99 percent of the human blueprint has now been mapped and that there's much more work to be done, but a very exciting day today in genetics.