And, increasingly, Whitfield now also finds himself in the public eye. Distressingly so, in fact. Incyte Genomics has become one of the most visible players in a pitched debate between academics and entrepreneurs over how to share the knowledge that's rapidly being gained into the workings of the human genome. Now, as a rough draft of the complete Human Genome Project appears likely to be released in just a matter of weeks, the voices of dissent have become shriller than ever. Even heads of state have felt moved to make their views known.

And at much of this, Whitfield can only shake his head in wonder.

When President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently took the position that genome data should be made freely available to scientists everywhere, people holding biotech stocks stampeded to the exits. You were quoted at the time as saying the panic owed largely to a failure to distinguish between genome sequences and gene sequences. What distinction should investors be making?

What Clinton and Blair were talking about was genomic data -- the raw code. When you have that, you actually don't have any genes at all. The genes have to be predicted from the raw code. And so what Incyte and other companies in the genomics field have been doing for the past five to six years is sequencing the genes themselves. And we've managed to compile an almost complete list of those genes. What Clinton and Blair were talking about was making the genomic sequence freely available. And that's been happening right along. But that's quite different from the genes themselves, which is where all the commercial utility lies.

For example, when Chromosome 22 was published last December, the Human Genome Project scientists predicted we'd find 545 genes on that chromosome. But because we'd actually sequenced the genes at Incyte, we knew that over 1,000 of our genes would match that chromosome. So they missed nearly half of them. Don't laugh. They admit it. It's not like they don't know about this problem. In fact, they said in their paper that they wished they had a transcribed gene sequence database, which is exactly what we have. And that, of course, is why almost all the major drug and biotechnology companies subscribe to our database.

Now, there's a lot of academic value in the genome. It gives you things like the gene structure, the promoter regions and all that. It really is the crowning glory from a scientific point of view. But there's not a lot of commercial value in that. Still, for most people, you say "human genome" and they automatically think you're talking about all the genes. But that's not the case. To find all the genes requires a database like ours. And another thing: Once you've found the genes, what you then want are physical copies, or clones. And we've archived all those so we can make them available to medical researchers worldwide.

In the last few weeks, Tony Blair has come out to say that public opinion should be weighed heavily in the ongoing debate over biotech regulatory policies. That means Britain now joins Switzerland and Iceland, two other countries that have insisted the public's voice be heard. Do you feel the general public should be part of that discussion?

Absolutely. And the fact of the matter is that they're involved already. I'm on the board of directors for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which works all the time with various government agencies on issues surrounding biotechnology. This sounds like an exhortation to do something that's already happening.

But what that really signifies is growing public awareness. People suddenly want to know what it means to have a copy of every human gene. What does it mean to have genetically modified foods? And these are all legitimate questions, right? So I see these as promising developments -- much better, certainly, than people making ill-advised comments or policy decisions based on ignorance.

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