Archaea make it big

There’s an old joke that circulates in newsrooms. A reporter rushes up to City Desk and breathlessly tells his editor that he has confirmed the Second Coming of Christ. The editor doesn’t want the story. “We had that one already — 2 000 years ago.” If it’s news, it has to be the first, the biggest, the oldest or the most, especially in science news. So, how do you make the papers if you’ve completed the fourth entire genetic sequence of an organism? If you’re J. Craig Venter at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), it can be done. Before August of this year, Venter already had two big notches in his genetic belt: he’d published the complete sequences of Haemophilus influenzae and Mycoplasma genitalium, garnering some press attention for each. (Another group announced the sequencing of the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but although the sequence is in GenBank, the paper hasn’t formally been published.) Good press is important to folks like Venter, who cut loose from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to form a for-profit company tightly allied with the non-profit (and governmentsupported) TIGR. So when Venter’s gene-crunchers sequenced Methanococcus jannaschii and got the paper accepted in Science, the question was how to earn bonus points with taxpayers and funding agencies. The answer lay in a professionally orchestrated media event. On August 22, Venter showed up in a rented room at the National Press Club in Washington DC, with a suite of guests, a satellite hook-up and some fabulous video cassettes, all designed to dazzle the media and sell the story. Often the toughest task for scientists is to get their stories on television, which is where most Americans get their news. That’s especially tricky if your story is about the untelegenic sequencing of 1 739 933 bases of DNA in a suburban office park. Venter’s PR outfit finessed this nicely by having ‘B roll’ — stock TV footage on video cassette — of the Alvin submarine poking around a hydrothermal vent at the bottom of the ocean. That’s where M. jannaschii was found 13 years ago, and it’s much more fun to look at than the flickering computer screens and endless gels that more accurately represent Venter’s accomplishment.