Sure, but Venter and Celera do deserve props for introducing whole genome shotgun, which became the de facto standard for getting most of the genome. This does

Sure, but Venter and Celera do deserve props for introducing whole genome shotgun, which became the de facto standard for getting most of the genome. This doesn't invalidate anything you're saying, because finishing is important, but the whole trend towards short reads and pushing more of the job to the computer was begun by Celera. Eugene Myers is/was an amazing computer scientist, and the public project would never have finished as quickly without the push from Celera. [beat] Also, all of this really deals with the technical aspects of obtaining a sequence, which is not really what Venter is talking about. He's saying that a good sequence isn't that useful! I'm not sure what he means with this, or whether he's just trying to be controversial.