Celera used HGP data but not vice versa, so that's not a fair comparison. Celera's use of shotgun sequencing was an inspired choice, but even in retrospect it w

Celera used HGP data but not vice versa, so that's not a fair comparison. Celera's use of shotgun sequencing was an inspired choice, but even in retrospect it wasn't obviously superior to HGP's chain termination. It was high risk high return bet that could well have failed, while HGP made a conservative choice. Sequencing has two parts of reading and assembling. Shotgun sequencing makes reading easier and assembling harder. Computing infrastructure of 1990s was barely enough to assemble shotgun reads of human genome, and Celera was overly optimistic from its success on fruit fly genome. They were saved by miracles and heroics at the end. Of course shotgun sequencing is much better now because we have much better computing infrastructure.