The news impressed investors because it shows that Celera, of Rockville, Md, is making good progress toward its goal of completing and publishing the human genome this year. Celera is racing the government-funded Human Genome Project to be the first to map the entire complement of human genes.

However, the government's effort is operating with a handicap because Celera is able to use gene data from the public effort to help its work, while the government-funded scientists don't yet have access to Celera's gene data. Celera is a unit of PE Corp.

``This is the first time in history that the genetic code of one person has been completely sequenced,'' said Celera president J Craig Venter. He said Celera plans to assemble its gene data over the next several weeks, then spend a few months identifying where key genes are located, before publishing the results in a scientific journal by year end.

Genomics stocks have been gyrating wildly in recent weeks as investors try to get a grip on whether these companies are really going to be able to make money. While the Celera accomplishment is a scientific tour de force, its commercial significance is unclear. Celera believes a giant market for gene information will eventually develop among drug companies, academic laboratories and even individuals seeking information about their genetic profile; it intends to become the dominant supplier of such gene information. But like most genomics companies, Celera has yet to show that it can translate raw gene data into big profits.

Scientists associated with the public project played down the significance of the Celera work and speculated that the timing of the announcement - the same day as a congressional hearing on the genome project - was aimed at boosting the company's stock price. ``They are doing a disservice to the whole field of genomics by hyping a minor milestone, which detracts from the real issue [of] getting the job done properly,'' said Richard Gibbs, who directs the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Meanwhile, Dr Eric Lander, who directs the Whitehead Institute's Center for Genome Research and is an important figure in the public-sequencing effort, worried that the Celera announcement would leave ``an incorrect impression that one company went off and sequenced the genome on its own,'' when the public effort is actually well along toward finishing its own rough draft of the human genome. Dr Venter said the timing of the announcement was coincidental.

``No matter what we do, here are some people who are going to be unhappy with it because we are being successful,'' he said. He added that the quantity of gene-sequence data matters less than how it is produced.

-- The Wall Street Journal