NEW project to sequence or decode the human genome was announced yesterday by Incyte Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, Calif.

This makes the third entry in the race to sequence the human genome, but Incyte may finish first. Dr. Randy Scott, president of Incyte, said the project would be finished in 12 to 24 months.

But Incyte's goal is different from that of the other two entrants. The company is concerned only with commercial value and does not intend to decode all three billion units of DNA, many regions of which consist of gibberishlike repeated sequences with no apparent function.

Dr. Scott said that the Incyte sequence would include ''all commercially relevant information,'' meaning that it would be only about 90 percent complete.

In contrast, the human genome project led by the National Institutes of Health and the Sanger Center in England is attempting to produce a complete, archival sequence of human DNA by 2005.

The other entrant in the race is Celera Genomics Corporation, a new company formed by the instrument maker Perkin-Elmer of Danbury, Conn., and headed by Dr. J. Craig Venter of the Institute for Genomic Research in Bethesda, Md.

Dr. Venter's goal is to produce what would essentially be a complete sequence of human DNA within three years. He expects his sequence to include numerous small gaps in the repetitive regions of DNA where it is often hard to nail down the exact number of repeats.

Both Celera and Incyte say their projects will cost about $200 million. The Government's human genome project has a total 15-year budget of $3 billion but includes different costs.

Unlike Celera and the Government project, Incyte will not publish its data. Incyte's principle reason for sequencing the genome is to help generate data on the DNA variations known as single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNP's.  SNP's, or ''snips,'' are the principle source of genetic differences among individuals.

Incyte plans to rent its snip library to drug companies to help discover the gene variants that contribute to disease as well as for pharmacogenomics, a new approach based on tailoring drugs to patients by analyzing the patient's snips.

Dr. Scott said that Incyte had already identified 100,000 human genes from partial sequences and estimated the total number may be as high as 150,000, a figure higher than many previous estimates.

SPURRED by competition from a commercial venture, the National Human Genome Research Institute said yesterday it would move up by two years, to 2003, its target for completing the sequence of the human genome.

In addition, one-third of the genome, containing about half of the genes, will be completed by 2001, said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the institute's director.

Sequencing the genome means determining the order of the 3 billion units of DNA that constitute the genetic programming of human cells. So far, only the genomes of single celled organisms like bacteria and yeast have been sequenced, and these typically contain 1 to 10 million units of DNA.

The project is expected to revolutionize the practice of biology and medicine. Although understanding the human genome is a task that will take decades, decoding the full sequence would be a giant first step. The achievement would, in principle, lead to molecular-level insights into both the normal operation of the human organism and of the mechanisms that go wrong in disease. Medical treatments could be tailored to an individual, based on the analysis of his genome. The genome also contains a wealth of information about human evolutionary history and early migration patterns.

The new target date intensifies a race between two formidable groups of biologists. Each is convinced that its own approach will succeed and the other will fail.

The goal of sequencing the human genome was formally embraced in 1990 when the National Institutes of Health began a program to complete the genome in 15 years at a cost of $3 billion. The 2005 goal was ambitious enough, and the new target date of 2003 is even more so.

What has spurred N.I.H., and the consortium of university sequencing centers it funds, is the surprise entry into the human genome field of Celera, a commercial company formed by the scientific instrument-maker Perkin-Elmer and Dr. J. Craig Venter, a biologist who pioneered the sequencing of bacterial genomes. Dr. Venter said in May that he would start sequencing the human genome next year and complete it by 2001.

If Dr. Venter should finish first, the N.I.H. consortium might have little to show for its efforts. But his methods and goals have been attacked by biologists who said his risky approach, even if it worked, would not produce DNA sequence of the completeness and accuracy required.

The university biologists have nonetheless now decided to restate the goals of their program, bringing forward the target date and planning to attack the gene-rich regions of the genome first.

Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and a former director of the NIH's Human Genome Project, said the new goal could be achieved and that the startup problems had now been worked out. Besides, he said, 2003 ''is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix.''

Dr. Collins, his successor as director, said the new plan is to focus first on the gene-rich regions of DNA. Half of the genes are located in one-third of the genome, he said, and by 2001 this third would be completed, along with a rough draft of 90 percent of the remainder.

''Celera has promised coverage by 2001 but our product will be substantially different in character,'' Dr. Collins said. He and other biologists said Dr. Venter's project would leave gaps in regions of the DNA.

Dr. Collins also emphasized that the N.I.H. consortium is sticking to its map-based approach as contrasted with Dr. Venter's shotgun method. In the map approach, the DNA is broken into fragments and the position of each fragment on the chromosome is first located. Dr. Venter's method is to sequence millions of DNA fragments and piece them together through their overlaps, without the bother of creating a map first.

Dr. Venter strongly disputes that his genome sequence will be less complete or accurate than that of the N.I.H. consortium. His sequence will in fact be far more useful in scientific terms, he says, because it will be based on the complete sequence of three and maybe five distinct individuals whereas the NIH project will yield a single sequence with bits and pieces drawn from many different individuals.

The Celera project will thus bring to light many polymorphisms, the DNA sites at which a gene has a variant spelling and which are the genetic basis of the differences between individuals. N.I.H. will search for these polymorphisms separately.

The N.I.H. project ''is putting humanity in a Waring blender and coming up with a patchwork quilt,'' Dr. Venter said. ''We will have between 10 and 30 million single nucleotide polymorphisms in our data base whereas the Government will have virtually none from its sequence.''

Critics of the Celera project believe that Dr. Venter will find it very difficult to assemble his many different fragments of DNA into complete chromosomes.

''I bet on the N.I.H. group,'' said Dr. William A. Haseltine, president of Human Genome Sciences and a former Venter partner. ''The more I have looked at the more difficulty I think they will have in assembling a coherent picture with the shotgun approach.''

THIS ancient university town, with its winding streets and medieval grandeur, has contrived to earn its place on maps of the contemporary world, too. Ever since the structure of DNA was discovered here in 1953, Cambridge has been a leading world center for molecular biology. And with the help of a recent bonanza from a long dead American pharmacist, Cambridge scientists have become leading players in the effort to decipher the human genome.

At least one-third, and maybe half, of the three billion DNA units in the genetic programming of human cells are to be deciphered at the Sanger Centre in the nearby village of Hinxton.

The Sanger Centre has produced more human DNA sequence than any of the seven American universities supported by the National Institutes of Health as part of its human genome project. The center's director, Dr. John E. Sulston, a biologist with a gentle voice and a heavy thatch of white hair, is unusual for a scientific administrator in that he still spends much of his time working in the laboratory. He is best known for having traced the exact lineage in which the single egg cell of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans gives rise to the 959 cells of the adult, a feat which took nearly 10 years of patient microscope work.

Dr. Sulston and his principal financial backer, the Wellcome Trust of London, wield a certain influence in the human genome program run by the National Institutes of Health, with which they are allied in an international consortium. In May, when the N.I.H. seemed inclined for a few days to let a new commercial venture take over human DNA sequencing, Dr. Sulston and Dr. Michael Morgan, the Wellcome Trust's program officer, declared that the human genome had to be in the public domain and that if the N.I.H. dropped out they would sequence it all themselves. The N.I.H. quickly regained its nerve.

Money and tradition are two pillars of the Sanger Centre's prominence. The money comes from the Wellcome Trust, a long dormant London philanthropy founded by an American pharmacist, Henry S. Wellcome, who moved to Britain in 1880.

Enjoined by Wellcome's will never to sell any part of its major asset, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs-Wellcome, the trust was for years unable to translate its growing wealth into real income. The trustees recently sidestepped this restriction at a time when the company had struck gold with AZT, the anti-AIDS drug, and other medicines. Sale of the company furnished the trust with an endowment currently worth $17 billion, making it the world's largest medical research philanthropy.

The Wellcome Trust has spent $120 million to build a Genome Campus at Hinxton, and has committed $350 million more to the Sanger Centre for sequencing the human genome.

The center's interest in sequencing the human genome can be traced, in a long but unbroken thread, to the discovery of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, by Dr. James D. Watson and Dr. Francis Crick. At the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Dr. Crick, with his colleague Dr. Sydney Brenner, turned to determining how the genetic message is encoded in DNA. With that task complete, the two men decided the brain was the next biological problem worthy of their attention, and Dr. Brenner resolved to crack the nervous system of the microscopic roundworm, C. elegans.

That enterprise did not work out. The wiring diagram of the little creature's nervous system turned out to have 5,000 connections, far too many for its behavior to be computed, as Dr. Brenner had hoped. But the cadre of students, many of them American, whom Dr. Brenner recruited to work on the worm, began to transform C. elegans into a powerful pilot project for understanding for the first time how an animal is put together at the level of its genes.

A major step toward this goal was taken by Dr. Sulston, one of Dr. Brenner's English students. After drawing his famous lineage map of how C. elegans is constructed from an egg, Dr. Sulston decided to determine the position of the worms' genes on their chromosomes, a task known as mapping. The map that he and others devised soon pointed to the concept of sequencing the worm's DNA.

The method for sequencing, or determining the order of the chemical units in DNA, was devised by another Cambridge scientist, Dr. Fred Sanger, after whom the Sanger Centre is named. The DNA sequencing method won him his second Nobel Prize in 1980. (The first was for sequencing proteins). But Dr. Sanger's DNA method was manual, and its speed was such that it would have taken 1,500 scientists working for a century to decipher the human genome.

When machines for sequencing DNA became available, based on an elegant adaptation of the Sanger method, Dr. Sulston and his colleague Alan Coulson believed it might be possible to sequence the full genome of the worm. With 100 million base pairs of DNA, its genome is one-thirtieth the size of the human genome.

Dr. Sulston and Dr. Coulson started the worm sequencing project in 1990 in collaboration with Dr. Robert H. Waterston, another of Dr. Brenner's worm students who is now director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, St. Louis. It was only after the worm genome project proved manageable that they and other biologists gained the confidence to propose sequencing the human genome.

Scientists who study the worm have a strong ethos of sharing their techniques and data, an attitude that Dr. Sulston and Dr. Coulson did much to foster through their development of the worm's genetic map. They and Dr. Waterston have tried hard to inject the same community attitude into study of the human genome, though it is a field turbulent with larger egos and the brusque manners of those who see fortunes to be made.

The Sulston-Waterston alliance has quietly generated the bulk of all DNA sequenced to date, being the most productive sequencers of both worm and human DNA. But the two centers' steady progress on the human genome was suddenly put at risk in May when a commercial rival jumped into the genome race, contending it would complete the job in two years.

The rival was a company formed by the instrument maker Perkin-Elmer and Dr. J. Craig Venter, the pioneer of sequencing of bacterial genomes. If their effort, now named Celera, were to finish first, the public programs paid for by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health might seem wasted effort.

Dr. Sulston said he firmly believed that Celera would not produce a DNA sequence of the completeness and accuracy that scientists need. ''The truth of the matter is that the Perkin-Elmer enterprise needs to make a profit, the public needs a structure that will serve biomedical research for the rest of time,'' he said. ''So my main reaction is to make sure that whatever happens in that company doesn't derail that objective. Humanity will be the poorer if it does.''

Throwing down the gauntlet to Dr. Venter, Dr. Sulston and Dr. Waterston said in the current issue of Science that their rival's strategy for sequencing the human genome was likely to prove ''woefully inadequate'' because of its probable inability to distinguish between the many regions of similar DNA sequence. On the other hand, new advances have ''removed doubts about the feasibility'' of their own approach, they said.

The human genome may be crammed with golden opportunities for pharmaceutical companies, but Dr. Sulston said he believed that to be really useful the gold must be put in the public domain, not hoarded, so that scientists everywhere can work on it. The Sanger Centre's expertise lies in sequencing the DNA, he said, and progress will be quicker if others interpret it. In contrast, American companies like Incyte and Human Genome Sciences contend they have sequenced thousands of human genes but intend to exploit them in secrecy.

The goal of placing the human genome sequence in the public domain is shared by the Wellcome Trust, which has also said it will challenge any patent claims based solely on DNA sequence.

The Sanger Centre and its partners at St. Louis are still working hard on the worm's genomic sequence, which they expect to complete by the end of the year. The milestone achievement would mark the first animal genome to be sequenced. So far only much smaller genomes have been sequenced, belonging to single-celled organisms like bacteria and yeast.

Dr. Venter, however, recently predicted that the worm genome would not be finished this decade if held to the standard of closing every gap in the DNA.

Asked if all the gaps in the worm DNA could be closed this year, Dr. Sulston replied mildly, ''One can't say, it's never been done before.'' But later, in his laboratory, he displayed a fast-shrinking list of gaps that had dwindled to fewer than 50.

Dr. Sulston has a staunch backer in Dr. Morgan, the program director at the Wellcome Trust who conceived the Genome Campus as the home for the Sanger Centre and other genome-based institutions. Dr. Morgan also funds the Sanger Centre to sequence the genomes of pathogenic bacteria, a field pioneered by Dr. Venter's Institute of Genomic Research.

The Sanger Centre recently beat the Institute in sequencing the complex genome of the microbe that causes tuberculosis, though none of its scientists are so brash as to crow about being first.

Dr. Morgan, however, noted that the method on which Celera is relying to sequence the human genome, known as shotgun sequencing, is one that Dr. Venter's institute has not yet made to work with the tuberculosis microbe, even though the organism's genome is minute compared with that of humans.

Since it opened in 1992, the Sanger Centre has fully sequenced 116 million bases of DNA, belonging to the genomes of humans, worms, yeast, fruit flies, mice, the fugu fish and sundry bacteria. But Dr. Morgan and Dr. Sulston intend to move on to other things eventually, such as the vast task of interpreting what the sequences mean. ''The Sanger Centre has got to evolve,'' Dr. Morgan said. ''It can't become a fossilized sequencing center. It must enter the post-genomic era.''

As President Clinton got ready to announce at the White House last month that Celera Genomics Group [which became Celera Genomics Corporation]  had discovered the genetic directions for building and running a human body, the company's chief executive filed in with hundreds of others and took a seat to the side of the stage, three or four rows from the rear.

[Tony Lee White (born 1947)] could have had a spot at the podium, one that Celera President [Dr. John Craig Venter (born 1946)] shared with Clinton. But it was his way of remaining behind the scenes, a curiously anonymous chief executive in a spectacularly visible company.

Staying in the shadows also belied his role in one of science's monumental achievements. The sequencing of the human genome has been compared to the completion of the periodic table of the elements and the moment of its announcement with the landing of men on the moon.

But it was White, a salesman by training, who orchestrated the race to map it largely because of the opportunity to sell.

From pushing for the development of the machine that sequenced it to forming the company that did it to choosing scientist Venter to run it, it was White, former company director Joseph F. Abely Jr. recalled, who led Celera's parent company "to come to grips with the human genome."

Still, [Tony Lee White (born 1947)] remains one of the least known minds in biotechnology, an industry hurtling into a future where the building blocks and worker bees of life's cells are being used to develop everything from drugs designed to choke cancer to cotton that grows in color.

[Tony Lee White (born 1947)], 53, also may be among the industry's most unlikely captains. Raised alternately amid a Cuban revolution and North Carolina poverty, he wandered through economics studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee before graduating without distinction.

Raised amid uncertainty, he became a master of gut instinct, a man who built a career at conventional, old-line businesses by breaking with convention.

White's successes include turnarounds at medical-supply company Baxter International Inc. and PE Corp [see PerkinElmer Incorporated]., the Celera parent company he now runs. Those successes largely have been based on avoiding the propensity of some CEOs to become wedded to a single -- and ultimately outmoded -- plan. They also have been based on a disdain for cumbersome detail that forces him to focus on the big picture, relying on experts for the rest.

Now, the man behind the curtain in the sequencing of the human genome is using the same instincts as he maps where to take his company next. It is -- once again -- a bold plan.

"This guy is a free-swinger," said Vernon Loucks Jr., former CEO at Baxter, where White worked for 26 years. "He isn't afraid once he's got an idea to go after it, and he did that with Celera in spades. That's Tony's game."

[Tony Lee White (born 1947)] was born in Havana to a Cuban mother and a North Carolinian father who met after his mother came to the state in the early 1940s for college. He grew up bilingual, watching his educated and wealthy Cuban grandparents lose everything in a revolution in the midst of which White was once forced to hit the floor of a bus as soldiers fired shots.

He also watched his father leave job after job. Today, White describes him as "kind of a hillbilly" who did not contribute to the support of the two-child family after his parents divorced. His mother made ends meet by working as a secretary at a cigarette paper plant 40 minutes from their Asheville home.

"Those struggling years were a big influence on my brother, because he didn't like the struggle," said Marco White, eight years Tony's junior and now in middle management with Coca-Cola Co. in Atlanta.

It was amid this uncertainty that Tony White learned to take life as it came, throwing himself into jobs such as loading furniture trucks and honing an engaging personality that landed him a part in the play "Cheaper By the Dozen."

He married his junior-high sweetheart but he never made a plan. Still, he knew as he walked through a career fair that what he was looking for was "my ticket out of there." He bypassed the booths of well-known companies, J. C. Penney among them, and headed up the steps to interview on a whim with a company he'd never heard of.

"I'd rather die," he told the Baxter Laboratories interviewers when asked, "than be your personnel manager in Kingstree, S.C." They offered him a career in sales instead.

At Baxter, White hit his stride. He repeatedly finished among the company's top sales producers and -- aided by his ability to speak Spanish -- was handed a job as export manager for a Baxter product line in Latin America.

It was a Baxter cesspool where salespeople followed the custom of the day by paying bribes to get accounts. White cleaned it up by setting sales targets, outlining his expectations for clean dealing and firing employees who didn't comply.

White was promoted to running the company's Latin American operation, and results were spectacular.

Revenue in the region climbed from about $50 million to several hundred million by the time he left it.

A White-inspired turnaround in Canada followed, and White's reputation took off.

He was one star in a constellation at Baxter, a company filled with young men who would go on to lead, from current Genzyme Corp. CEO Henri Termeer to Wilbur H. "Bill" Gantz of PathoGenesis Corp. James R. Tobin, now chief executive officer of medical-device manufacturer Boston Scientific Corp., was among them. He often used White to help diagnose problems.

On one occasion, when Tobin was in his early 30s and the new head of Baxter's operations in Spain, he was stumped by a broken-down business unit he had just inherited.

The business was supposed to make and market intravenous solutions, but the production plant had been shut down for months because of a mysterious contaminant, inventories were wiped out and the business was losing money on sales.

"Tony came over and wandered around awhile," Tobin recalled of how White began to evaluate the problems. A bottle-washer was spraying particles into bottles it was supposed to be cleaning, and the head of the IV business needed to be fired. "Get rid of that turkey," White told Tobin.

Tobin took the advice. But years later, after White's blunt assessment of another situation had offended a peer for what seemed like the umpteenth time, then company President Gantz called White into his office.

Penchant for straight talk

"You do a great job" Gantz told him, but he warned that White's blunt style was hurting his chances for advancement.

Ultimately, White rose to become part of a four-man "office of the chief executive," but he never got Baxter's top job. He would later conclude that his lack of a Harvard Business School pedigree had hurt him, along with his penchant for straight talk.

Loucks, the longtime Baxter CEO and chairman who retired last year, said it was none of those things.

"Perkin-Elmer [now PE] was in a situation where you started at rock bottom," Loucks said about why White's free-swinging aggressiveness has played well at the company he now heads, but wasn't suited to the top spot at Baxter.

"Heroic kinds of actions fit better there than they do in an organization that's not all that broken," Loucks said.

White stayed on at Baxter, but he felt the tension between himself and Loucks increasing. One day, he said, Loucks asked him when he was going to retire. White was stunned. He was 48.

Loucks denies the incident, but when a call came to interview at Perkin-Elmer Corp. for the top spot, White went ahead.

What he found was a potential cleanup job that intrigued him. Perkin-Elmer Corp. had made its mark in a business with now-unspectacular returns, selling garden-variety lab gear and instruments used in the environmental and chemical industries to test for contaminants. Its departing CEO and board had recognized a future in life sciences in 1993 when they bought [Applied Biosystems], a Foster City, Calif., company whose products included DNA-synthesizers and analyzers, but they had let it languish.

White's due diligence included meeting with the company's investment bankers, who told him a third of Perkin-Elmer's stock-market value was because of the fact that investors thought it was about to be taken over.

White took the job in the fall of 1995 and began studying it, piece by piece.

"I've got to go through here and look at what can and can't be turned around," he told his brother in a phone call.

To White, it quickly became apparent that the cash-generating life sciences business was being robbed to prop up the declining old lab business. He reversed the emphasis, using revenue from the old division to support research and development in life sciences.

One of his first steps, he recalled, was to light a fire under development of a next-generation DNA sequencer, a market he did not want the company to lose to competitor Amersham Pharmacia Biotech.

"If anyone wants to make obsolete what we do today, it's going to be us," White said he thought at the time. He gave [Applied Biosystems]' head Michael W. Hunkapiller $8 million more to pursue the job.

To Mike Albin, head of a Biosystems unit formed to do "blue sky" thinking about future products, the change was palpable. White, despite years with an old-line medical-supply company, seemed to have a Silicon Valley mentality. After White came on board, he said, "The level of support for what we wanted to do went up significantly."

Even with all his experience at Baxter, White was in some ways an unlikely choice to lead what would become a genomics company -- one based on exploring the detail of the 3.2 billion-unit genome. Notoriously impatient with minutiae, White turned to an illustrated paperback guide called "The Cartoon Guide to Genetics" for some of his first lessons on genes and proteins after becoming CEO.

But scientists soon began to respect him. White's ignorance seemed to give him the curiosity to explore ideas, and his focus on the big picture helped him cut to the chase in meetings when his scientists began debating and massaging tangents, said company director Georges C. St. Laurent Jr., who has known White for years.

Stephen A. Martin, now director of the company's nascent Proteomics Research Center, said White seemed to have a good sense of when scientists were just "blowing smoke."

White had also softened his style because of Gantz's advice. At Perkin-Elmer, he acted more like a quiet but forceful facilitator, a behind-the-scenes direction-giver curiously overlooked by nearly all who later would pass out credit for the genome.

Taking the next step

White had realized almost immediately that reversing the emphasis at Perkin-Elmer wouldn't be enough.

The life sciences division, if it were to be the foundation of the company, would have to be strengthened through acquisitions. He gave himself three years to increase revenue to more than $1 billion from the $350 million he inherited. He planned to cut the old business loose once the new one had enough mass to stand alone.

A hunt began, leading in part to Framingham, Mass.-based [PerSeptive Biosystems], a manufacturer of machines used for, among other things, determining the structures of proteins -- the worker bees of cells.

PerSeptive Chief Executive Officer [Dr. Noubar Afeyan (born 1962)] was a serial entrepreneur who had never worked for anyone but himself. After six years of running his latest company, he itched for both a way to cash out and a change. He grew to admire White's entrepreneurial bent as the two negotiated the sale of PerSeptive. To Afeyan, White's plan for reinventing Perkin-Elmer gave the old company the feeling of a start-up.

When White asked him to accept a job plotting strategy at Perkin-Elmer, Afeyan accepted.

Transforming the company, White told Afeyan in their initial conversations, is "going to involve some subtraction and some addition. What I want you to worry about is how we extend the business model."

As Afeyan waited for federal antitrust regulators to clear his company's acquisition by Perkin-Elmer, he began mapping out a plan with multiple options, including a genomics information company.

About November 1997, he presented the options to the board of directors in an introductory meeting. The same month, at a meeting of 20 or so Perkin-Elmer executives in Foster City, Calif., the planning took on sharp focus.

Afeyan, still new to his strategic role and a relative stranger to most in the room, sat by White and listened to one of [Applied Biosystems]' employees make a presentation on a machine the company would dub the ABI Prism 3700. It could sequence DNA at breathtaking speed. Afeyan did some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations and blurted, "You know, we could do the whole genome with a couple hundred of these." White was intrigued.

Applied President Michael W. Hunkapiller wasn't so sure. Afeyan recalled that Hunkapiller -- later widely given credit for coming up with the idea -- told the group that sequencing the genome would compete with customers, the research institutions and pharmaceutical companies that bought its products to do just those sorts of calculations. PE was a products company, he pointed out. Perhaps the company should stick to its knitting.

In an interview, Incyte Genomics Chief Executive Officer Roy Whitfield said Hunkapiller had raised the same concern years earlier. Incyte, already a genomics information company like the one Celera would become, had pitched the idea of Incyte and Applied sequencing the genome together in a nonprofit venture, Whitfield said. Hunkapiller declined.

"This was way back in '92," Whitfield said. "Mike said, 'There's no way we can do that. We're an instrument company and there is potential for us being viewed as competing with customers.'"

Afeyan, new in his strategic role, felt chastened by Hunkapiller's concerns at the meeting. Hunkapiller was a pioneer in the development of DNA analyzers and an influential voice.

White felt differently. As the meeting continued, he leaned over with a reassuring order. "Don't back off," he told Afeyan. "I really want us to think about this."

After considering several scientists for the invitation to run the genomic information company he decided to form, White tapped Hunkapiller to call and invite Venter to take a look at the 3700.

Venter, White decided, was above all a brilliant sequencer who also would have the drive and experience to complete the human genome.

Once Venter was on board, White arranged to meet him while they were both in the Virgin Islands on separate family vacations. With their families gathered around them, the two men discussed the project at the Bitter End Yacht Club, and White made his expectations clear.

Venter may have been a rebel when he parted ways with drug development company Human Genome Sciences Inc., but "this was clearly a corporate environment," White said, "and we couldn't do that."

Brave new world

It has been just over a month since the sequencing of the genome was announced.

Celera sister company Applied Biosystems has just released its first microtechnology product onto the market, and the company promises more are coming. Such inventions promise to move discovery to smaller, cheaper and easier-to-use means -- even to "labs on a chip."

At  [PerSeptive Biosystems], engineers are testing a new, high-speed protein analyzer for shipment to Celera. A bevy of the machines, it is hoped, will allow Celera to explore the structures of proteins involved in creating and curing disease faster than any other on the face of the earth.

Last week, [  Tony Lee White (born 1947)] and [ Dr. John Craig Venter (born 1946)] explained more about what that will mean to the company's future, saying  [PerSeptive Biosystems]'s new protein analyzer will be the basis for starting a drug-discovery business at [ Celera Genomics Corporation].

While Celera probably wouldn't manufacture, test or market the protein-based drugs itself, the strategy would allow it to earn royalties on sales of drugs developed using Celera discoveries.

Exactly how the effort will be focused hasn't been decided. Plenty of other companies have microtechnology products on the market, and others are far ahead on discovering useful proteins. As a result, for at least the past month, White has been wrestling, somewhat fitfully, with this latest inspiration.

He talked it over with his old colleague Bill Gantz on a flight to California about a month ago. White's corporate jet had picked Gantz up, and the two headed out to a Goldman Sachs conference together.

As the miles flew by, the two old friends commiserated about the fact that, even with an accomplishment like mapping the human genome, the world quickly moves on. It wants to know what's next.

"It's the life of a CEO: You're expected to have all the answers," Gantz said."And guess what? Sometimes you don't.".

Aright hand, a forearm and a clavicle, and the DNA they carried, were all investigators had to identify the remains of Timothy Stout, who worked on the 103rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. 

Two fingerprints and a dental pattern proved key to confirming the death of David Suarez, who worked a few floors below. 

A genetic analysis of a bone fragment determined the final fate of John C. Hartz, who was on the phone with his wife describing the horror of the first attack when the south tower, where he worked, was struck by a second hijacked plane. "I have never been able to understand why people have been so intent on recovering bodies," said Mr. Hartz's widow, Ellie. "Now I understand. It is a basic human need. We are tactile." 

These confirmations, achieved in the last month, are each scientific miracles made possible by the largest forensic investigation in United States history, one that is pressing the limits of biomedical research even as it brings a painful mixture of relief and fresh grieving to families. But these are just 3 out of 972 identifications that investigators have made as of Friday. 

A third of the 2,824 victims of the World Trade Center attack have now been identified, a number far beyond what many had thought would be possible. The goal now, experts involved in the effort say, is to use new scientific techniques to identify half or even two-thirds of the victims, despite the miserably deteriorated state of many of the remains being pulled from ground zero. 

The endeavor spans the nation, from genetics laboratories in Utah, Texas, Maryland and Virginia to law enforcement bureaus in Washington and Albany; even a California forensic statistician is helping. But the federally financed job, of course, is centered in New York City, at the World Trade Center site, where remains have been meticulously collected, and at the medical examiner's office, at 520 First Avenue in Manhattan, where 18 refrigerated trailers hold the evidence. 

To date, 18,937 body parts have been recovered, along with 287 whole bodies. Most of the first successes in identifying victims have come through traditional resources like fingerprints and dental records, and those techniques are still yielding results. But because of the extraordinary trauma involved in the towers' collapse, DNA is often the only hope of matching remains to a name, a family, a life story. In fact, through Friday, only 10 victims so far have been identified solely by visual confirmation. 

DNA, first used as a forensic tool in 1985, led to the identification of all of the bodies in a Swissair plane crash in 1998 and an EgyptAir plane crash in 1999, two accidents in which jets plunged into the Atlantic. In the days after the Sept. 11 attack, city officials announced that they felt compelled to test each bit of human remains that could be found. 

"This is an historic event of unprecedented magnitude, and the question was if the scientific community could respond to that need," said Mark D. Stolorow, executive director of Orchid Cellmark, a genetics company. "The response has been surprisingly swift. We are scientists, but we are also American scientists." 

Progress has not come at an even pace. Only 2 of the 65 people aboard United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower, have been identified, according to city records. By comparison, 182 of the 343 city firefighters, who wore protective gear, have been identified. 

Since the day of the attack, the identification effort has proceeded simultaneously on multiple tracks. Dental records, details on any tattoos, engraved rings or other unique items were collected by the police, in the hope that traditional identification approaches might be sufficient. But city investigators also started immediately to assemble DNA from victims' families, who supplied toothbrushes, razors, even lip balm used by a victim, which presumably would contain his or her DNA. Cheek swabs from the victims' relatives were also taken. 

Each person's DNA, or genetic code, consists of a string of three billion "base pairs," or large molecules, represented by the letters "A," "G," "C," and "T." Sequences of those four molecules create the code for all human characteristics, and variations in those sequences make one person different from another. Those same variations also allow DNA to be used like a fingerprint. 

To start this effort, the city relied on a well-proven DNA technique, called Short Tandem Repeat, in which the laboratories looked for 13 different markers in each sample of human remains collected from ground zero, measuring the size of each marker and assigning the equivalent of a Social Security number to each fragment of remains. An analysis would also be done on the 6,908 razor blades, combs, toothbrushes and other personal items, and the 6,889 cheek swabs from victims' relatives. 

Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City and the Bode Technology Group of Springfield, Va., handled most of this initial work. Bode alone has been sent 12,000 bone samples, 5,500 soft tissue samples and 1,800 samples from family members. The results are being sent back to the New York State Police, and then the city medical examiner's office, where staff members start on the difficult work of matching DNA profiles from the remains with those from the family items and confirming the accuracy of each step. 

This effort gradually started to produce significant results: 57 DNA identifications in November, 69 in March and 92 in April, as of Friday. But nothing is coming easily. 

The fires that burned for weeks after the towers fell were so hot that even when bones were recovered, they were often little more than ash. The moisture at the site and bacteria caused further degradation. The result is that nearly half of the first round of samples tested at DNA labs have come back with incomplete profiles, city officials said. 

In as many as 700 cases, the medical examiner's office has been unable to link a DNA profile that was isolated from a piece of remains with any of the profiles established based on the items supplied by the victim's families. Making the matches has become almost an obsession for Dr. Robert Shaler, the director of forensic biology with the city's medical examiner's office. He finds himself at his office at 5 a.m., at his computer, again and again, trying to make just one more match. He wonders as he arrives for work: "Can I make matches? Can I make matches?" 

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he already was amazed at the success Dr. Shaler, and his boss, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the city's chief medical examiner, have had. "I honestly think on the evening of Sept. 11th, none of us who observed it, saw it, watched it, were involved in it, ever thought you would have been able to identify a third of the people," Mr. Giuliani said. 

But Dr. Shaler and other city officials say they are far from satisfied. They believe they have another eight months of work, as they are just now pushing ahead again, in a second wave of testing. 

Celera Genomics , a Maryland company best known for its work in sequencing the human genome in recent years, is applying its fast DNA sequencing machines to the World Trade Center identification effort. Celera's work, in conjunction with its Applied Biosystems division, is focusing on tiny rings of DNA in cell structures called mitochondria. These maternally inherited rings are hardier than the long strands of DNA used in the more traditional tests, and there are as many as 10,000 of them in each cell, giving investigators much more to work with. This approach has been used before — including the 1994 identification of the remains of Czar Nicholas II of Russia — but never before on such a large scale. 

The city is also turning to techniques that have never been used before in forensic investigations: single nucleotide polymorphisms, known as snips, are telltale variations in single base pairs scattered throughout the genome — an A instead of a T, say. The snips can be found even when a victim's DNA has been broken into fragments as short as 60 to 80 base pairs, much less than required in the traditional tests, Mr. Stolorow of Orchid Cellmark said. 

In preliminary attempts, the success rate for developing DNA profiles of victims who could not be identified with the other methods has been "encouragingly high," Mr. Stolorow said. The full process of getting profiles, matching them with DNA from relatives and other sources is expected to take two to three months, he added. 

These incursions into uncharted scientific territory and even the identifications that have come from traditional means have produced a volatile amalgam of deep gratitude, a resurgence of September's searing grief, the need to grapple with unfamiliar choices, and more than a few surprises in the worlds of bereaved families. 

One surprise lay hidden in the hopes of 12-year-old Brendan Regan until the remains of his father, Robert Regan, a lieutenant in Engine Company 205, Ladder Company 118 in Brooklyn Heights, were found and identified on New Year's Day. The results came quickly, based on dental records and a medal of St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters, inscribed with his children's names. 

"It turned out that up until that point, my son had held out an unbelievable hope in his heart that he was still capable of having a miracle occur," Lieutenant Regan's widow, Donna Regan, said. "He felt my husband may have crawled to a safe spot" and somehow survived, she said. Now, Mrs. Regan hopes, her son can begin the long and difficult process of healing. 

But the prospect that science could again and again identify more of a victim's remains has put some families in a torturous limbo. "We decided to hold off on the funeral," said Robert Alonso, whose wife, Janet Alonso, worked for Marsh & McLennan on the 95th floor of the north tower. Some of her remains were identified less than two weeks ago. 

"The last thing we needed was to have a service and then say, `They've found more remains at ground zero,' " Mr. Alonso said. 

The impact on families of techniques that can identify almost any fragment of a loved one's remains is not always positive. "It's very upsetting," one widow said of the news. "I almost threw up." 

Given those emotions and the fact that dozens of distinct remains are being found at times from a single victim, the medical examiner's office is giving families the option of being notified only once, when the first confirmation is made. They are also giving families the alternative of leaving any identified remains at the morgue until all testing is over, so that a single burial can take place. 

Still, everyone expresses thanks for the monumental effort taking place at ground zero and at labs across the country. The identifications help families escape what Mrs. Regan calls the "vanish factor": not having anything tangible on which to focus the last goodbyes. 

Mr. Alonso said thoughts of his children, ages 2 and 3, help him cope with the upwelling of grief that the identification of his wife has brought. "Questions will be coming as we get older: `Where's Mommy? What happened to Mommy?' " Mr. Alonso said. A grave site, he said, "brings me a place where when the kids get older and understand, I can bring them and show them something.