The [Perkin-Elmer Corporation] said yesterday that it had agreed to acquire [PerSeptive Biosystems] Inc., a maker of laboratory kits and instrumentation used by biotechnology companies, in a stock swap valued at $360 million.

Perseptive, based in Framingham, Mass., is a leading producer of equipment used to separate and identify intact proteins, which form the basis of most biotechnology drugs, and has also developed advanced products for the separation and purification of biological molecules in the life science market. [Perkin-Elmer Corporation], through its 1993 acquisition of [Applied Biosystems] Inc., is a leading provider of DNA sequencing and synthesizing equipment to biotechnology companies.

The acquisition will allow [Perkin-Elmer Corporation] to add greater value to gene-based drug discovery than it has had as a tools provider, said Peter Barrett, Perkin-Elmer's vice president for business development. Making the company a player in the emerging field of genomics, rather than just an instrument vendor, has been a key strategy of [Tony Lee White (born 1947)], who joined Perkin-Elmer two years ago as chairman, president and chief executive.

''If you look at the genomics companies, like Human Genome Sciences or Incyte, the value created by these companies is driven by our systems,'' Mr. Barrett said in a telephone interview. ''What we're trying to do here is move to another level of platform delivery, to move closer to the information.''

The deal valued Perseptive at $13 a share. Its shares surged 17 percent, or $1.8125, to $12.4375 in Nasdaq trading. Perkin-Elmer shares rose 62.5 cents, to $78.6875, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Analysts said the deal would strengthen Perkin-Elmer's product line on the biotechnology side, which is growing, and help offset the slowing of its traditional business in chemical analysis tools. Because Perseptive has not yet been profitable, the deal will reduce earnings per share in the near term, but should provide a long-term income boost, they said.

''They're trying to expand their exposure to biotechnology instrumentation,'' said Lawrence W. Borgman, an analyst with Josephthal Lyon & Ross. ''They're very big in DNA synthesis because of Applied Biosystems; with this they add a presence in proteins as well,'' he said. ''The biotech side of the business is growing and has good margins.''

For Perseptive, which expects revenue of $85 million in its fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the deal removed uncertainties about future financing and distribution.

''We felt that under the value proposition presented to us by Perkin-Elmer, our objectives would be better accomplished by the merger,'' [Dr. Noubar Afeyan (born 1962)], Perseptive's chairman and chief executive officer, said in a telephone interview. ''The constraints we've had will be eliminated.''

After 26 years at Baxter International, [Tony Lee White (born 1947)] realized that he would never get the top job and couldn't bear working for whoever did. So in 1995 he set out for his first job interview since college, auditioning to run Perkin-Elmer, an ailing maker of laboratory instruments.

It was just for practice, and a Perkin-Elmer board member even asked him, "Why in the world would you want to do this?" The company was a sad sack, struggling with high costs and a hodgepodge of unremarkable product lines. Sales had grown only 5% or so a year since 1990, and earnings had been spotty. But Tony White took the job because in the dross he had spied a jewel: a growing business that sold specialized gear for analyzing DNA, the molecular code of inheritance.

Perkin-Elmer had bought the business a few years earlier, unceremoniously folding it into a mishmash of lab gear. "I was fascinated: Why weren't they doing more with this technology?" White says.

He has bet the entire company on it. In so doing [Tony Lee White (born 1947)], now 53, has helped open the way for a revolution in medicine. New secrets sifted from the human genetic code will speed drug development, eliminate side effects, yield new therapies for fixing flawed genes and reveal unseen targets for conquering cancer, hypertension, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and more. Someday genetic mapping may prove to be the most fundamental medical advance since 19th-century researchers recognized that germs cause disease, ushering in modern vaccines, antibiotics and sterilized operating rooms.

[Tony Lee White (born 1947)] and his company hope to profit handsomely from all of this. He has remade the listless manufacturer into a phenom in the hot field of genomics, plowing millions into DNA and jettisoning the old core business. He used retirement, layoffs and asset sales to cut the payroll 80%, and he even sold off the Perkin-Elmer name. In its place is PE Corp., a holding company with two units. Last May White set up the DNA machines unit as PE Biosystems and created a sibling to be its biggest customer: Celera Genomics.

Talk about symbiosis: PE Bio would build the fastest sequencers in the world. Celera--that's Latin for "speed"--would lease 300 of them (they sell for $300,000 a pop) and race to be the first to map the entire genome, the 3-billion-character DNA recipe for making a human being. The two shops would work together on next-generation machines. Better yet, Celera's push might prod other customers to buy even more machines. This month Celera turns up the heat by revealing new details about one of the most studied species on the planet--the fruit fly.

In a masterstroke, White scuttled the old Perkin-Elmer stock last May to issue two trackers, one for each half of this two-headed gene-hunter. The old Perkin was valued at $1.5 billion when Tony White took over on Sept. 12, 1995. In four months his reshaped genes shop has tripled in value, to $24 billion--$6.5 billion more than the market cap of Baxter, the titan that spurned him.

PE Bio stock is up sixfold since May; Celera is up tenfold. Capitalizing on a frenzy that values Celera at a jarring $6 billion or 180 times annualized sales, Celera plans to raise perhaps $300 million more in a stock offering this spring to fund its next genetic quest.

That's a command performance for a guy who still aches over topping out at Baxter. "Maybe I didn't have the right pedigree--I hadn't been to business school, my father hadn't been a big CEO," he says. "Or maybe I was too aggressive and just didn't have the style."

Now [Tony Lee White (born 1947)] must turn the translation of DNA into real profits and try to justify PE Corp.'s huge valuation. To run Celera, White in 1998 hired the famous gene-hunter [Dr. John Craig Venter (born 1946)], 53, a genius who's widely touted for a Nobel Prize. Venter, then head of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, had created widely used techniques for plucking genes from the innards of cells.

The U.S. government was funding the Human Genome Project, an international research effort whose biggest overseas contribution comes from the Sanger Centre in Britain. The project was intended to map all 100,000 genes at a cost of $3 billion over 15 years(later reduced to 5). Venter created an unorthodox way of sequencing to cut the time in half. But when he asked for a grant to try the idea--"whole-genome shotgun sequencing"--he was rejected.

Venter was in the mood to hear "Yes," and he signed on to create and run Celera soon after seeing PE Bio's hottest box: the ABI Prism 3700 Analyzer. The automated gene-sequencer would do to DNA workers what the steam locomotive did to the stagecoach driver.

Venter publicly vowed to sequence the human genome in just three years and at about a tenth the cost of the government effort. Last month Celera unveiled a surprise: It had tracked 90% of the 3 billion "base pairs" of the genome, a year ahead of schedule. The full recipe for cooking up a human being could be ready by year-end.

Whether that revelation is useful science or a publicity stunt, it's only a starting point. For now comes the dirty work: sifting out the genes themselves from the 3 billion pieces; finding which ones are involved in disease; and learning what proteins they control and what those proteins do. And Celera must find a way to make money on it.

Some rivals are doubtful. "Genomics has been oversold, at least in terms of what it can do in the coming ten years," says Jean-Michel Claverie, head of the Structural & Genetic Information Laboratory in Marseille, France. He says that drugmakers can't handle the leads they have now, let alone those that genomics will unleash on them.

Celera's focus on mapping the genome is more of a massive science project than a business plan, contends William Haseltine, the CEO of Human Genome Sciences. "To hell with sequencing 3 billion base pairs--let's cure people," he says. His company has three gene-targeted drugs in late human trials; Celera has none.

Celera sees multiple revenue streams: from drugmakers that pay millions to get an early peek at the gene data before they are posted on the web; by staking a claim to the genes that its own scientists find; and by developing new tools for going beyond the bare sequence to uncover significant patterns and strategies for drug research.

Pfizer, Novartis and four other drugmakers (Amgen, Pharmacia & Upjohn, Rhne-Poulenc Rorer and RhoBio) pay $5 million or more apiece per year for Celera data. (Another company, Gemini Holdings of Britain, is collaborating with Celera to discover genes associated with age-related diseases.) Venter sees a web model: His gene portal will be so useful that it locks in subscribers. He also wants to retail to the rest of us. Many people, he says, might pay $10 a month to learn if a newly discovered genetic flaw turns up in their samples.

This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Later this year, Venter says, Celera's website will begin soliciting cell samples, swabbed from the inside of the cheek, to let a person learn whether he carries such fun-to-know genes as clock, which tells whether you are a morning person.

Venter's boss, Tony White, was born in Havana to a Cuban mother and an American father, and he grew up bilingual in Cuba and Asheville, North Carolina.His family had little money, and White barely scraped by in high school. He graduated from Western Carolina University and signed on as a trainee with Baxter International after a jobs fair it held in 1969.

White rose as high as executive vice president before bailing out. The company he took over was founded in the early 1930s by two partners who shared an interest in astronomy, Richard Perkin and Charles Elmer. In six decades it had run through more personalities than Sybil possessed. It made bombsights in World War II, then optics instruments, then satellite devices and chipmaking machines.

Perkin-Elmer said that this deliberately mismatched set of businesses made it a high-tech conglomerate, "which is an oxymoron, of course," White says. "You're either high-tech and know what you're doing, or you're a conglomerate." He adds: "It was not at all apparent that Perkin-Elmer was a diamond in the rough."

Yet it had two things right. Perkin-Elmer had acquired rights to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a fabulously productive chemical process for copying DNA. It has been used widely in forensic tests, notably in the O.J. Simpson trial. And in 1993 the company bought Applied Biosystems of Foster City, California, a maker of DNA sequencers that use PCR.

A year later the business provided about a third of Perkin-Elmer's $1.1 billion in sales. But much of its cash was poured down a rathole, into the aging analytical-instruments side. Applied Bio's sales, R&D and manufacturing were dissolving into the company. In a year there would have been no trace.

By the time White arrived in 1995, some investors were fed up. One fund manager wanted to liquidate then and there. "I pointed out that my contract cost was still running, they were stuck with me, and so they might as well give me a chance," White says.

A few months into his new job, White gave the sequencer business the lion's share of the resources. The instruments business had been set for $30 million in seed money. White took it all away and cut costs to fix up the unit for sale. (In July it was sold to EG&G; based in Wellesley, Massachusetts, it inherits the name of Perkin-Elmer.)

Then he told the genetics staff to reinvest their own cash flow "and if that were not enough, we'd borrow money and do whatever it took." The need never arose. White juiced up options for employees and as Perkin-Elmer stock started rising, the halls began to fill with millionaires. By early 1998 the biosystems business' annual sales were near $1 billion, tripling in three years.

By then PE Bio brass was wondering what to make of the 3700 analyzer, which could sequence DNA faster than anything in the world. What was needed was a gigantic stimulus of demand. With enough of these babies, PE itself could rapidly sequence the entire genome. Setting off a race might spur demand for PE Bio's gear.

All they needed was a gene-hunter, preferably a fanatic. So White hired Venter, who is armed with a gift for science and sound bites. "The day after we announced Celera, we set off an arms race, and we were the arms business," says White. "Everyone, including the government, had to retool, and that meant buying our equipment."

PE Corp., then, is akin to RCA, which started the NBCnetwork to sell more radio sets. It formed Celera in May 1998, handed Venter a pile of options to run it and put up $330 million. Celera's sequencers run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, giving it, by some estimates, roughly half of the world's sequencing capacity. PE Bio's share of large-scale sequencers is about 80%, says Winton Gibbons, an analyst with William Blair. It has sold 1,100 of its 3700s, letting PE Corp. recoup much of its bet.

Celera uses the 3700 to put down, in proper order, the four repeating molecules in the DNA double helix: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine. Venter applies massive computing power to unravel this seemingly random string, 3 billion letters long, of As, Gs, Cs and Ts. Before, researchers painstakingly copied DNA strands many thousands of letters long by starting at known points on the 46 chromosomes.

Venter's shotgun method blows apart the entire genome into smaller segments of only 2,000 to 10,000 letters then uses supercomputer power to sequence the shreds and piece them back together. Some researchers see it as a sloppy approach. It had been tried only on bacteria-size genomes, and some doubted whether the shotgun could scale up to human dimensions.

"We have a set of simple puzzles, like what a 5-year-old might play with," says Kathy Hudson of the U.S. government's genome project. "Celera has a thousand-piece puzzle picturing white-clad skiers on a snow-covered slope."

She says her project has just one error per thousand letters; Celera's has one in a hundred. But Venter says he can attain greater accuracy by crunching the genome another time or two and using government data as they emerge. "We're cooperating with them, whether they want us to or not," he notes dryly.

Meantime, Celera has an exclusive view of a lot of real estate that no one else has seen. Shotgun sequencing is how Celera hit the 90% mark last month.

But that is just a start. Only 3% of the DNA constitutes genes, and each gene can span tens of thousands of letters. In 30 years of modern gene-hunting, scientists have identified only 4,000 of the 100,000 genes. It will be tough to track the rest and isolate the key ones, such as those involved in cancer. Each gene, moreover, has a formula for making unique proteins; each one must be studied to learn the role it plays.

Researchers also must learn the function of the other 2.9 billion non-gene letters of DNA. How do they regulate when genes switch on in one kind of cell but go dark in another, forming brain cells, say, instead of skin? Or turn on a gene at one time but not another, such as during fetal development?

Worse, to handle most of these challenges, there aren't automated machines like the 3700. PE Bio is working on it. So daunting is the task that even Celera's spokesman, Paul Gilman, who is paid to hype, instead cautions: "It will take decades. Nothing will be absolutely understood anytime in this century."

Learning these secrets will require an abundance of DNA. Yet Celera has used samples from just 5 people, culled from a set of 30 volunteers. It turns out that Celera had to take only one sample from each subject, thanks to the DNA-copying process, PCR.

PCR works by using heat to pry apart the two intertwined spirals of DNA, whose complementary lettering normally makes them stick together like Velcro. Then it uses an enzyme, polymerase, to pluck spare DNA letters from the surrounding solution and zip them to their Velcro-like counterparts, one letter at a time, building a new double helix from each half.

Result: two perfect copies. Heat again, cool, and you have four; pretty soon, you have enough bulk material to analyze by traditional chemical means. Without this discovery, for which its inventor won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, mass sequencing--and hence genomics--would be impossible.

After the human genome is in the can, Celera scientists will sequence people from different ethnic groups to discover points at which their DNA differs by a single letter. Such differences are called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). About 3 million of them differentiate the average person from his neighbor--one DNA letter out of a thousand.

These SNPs are like pins sticking into the human DNA map. Find enough and you begin to fish out the genetic basis for physiological differences--why a cholesterol-lowering drug works in one patient but not another, why malarial infections leave some children alive but give others fatal brain fevers.

"We have lots of things in the hopper," White says, including "a product that will use a form of SNP detection to diagnose disease," and new protein-analysis gear.

The scale of investment required shows his faith in genetic medicine. At Celera's base in Rockville, armies of robotic sequencers work in eerie silence in gene labs, feeding data to supercomputers. The electricity bill runs $1 million a year.

Yet the site isn't nearly big enough for what White plans: Celera has increased its storage capacity to 50 terabytes, enough to hold five Libraries of Congress. That's far more than Celera needs to store the genomes it will target next: mice, dogs, chimpanzees, others.

What's all that storage capacity for? Tony White isn't saying. But it shows how great his aspirations are--and how much work lies ahead.

An intense focus on putting genes to practical use has propelled John Craig Venter from an obscure federal researcher to a principal decoder of the human genome.

Born on Oct. 14, 1946, in Salt Lake City, he earned a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego and entered the world of biochemical research at the National Institutes of Health. Frustrated at having to spend 10 years trying to isolate a single gene, Dr. Venter realized there was a quick way to fish out the genes, which in the case of humans occupy only 3 percent of the genome.

The technique was to capture the normal copies of genes made by living cells and to decode a few hundred DNA units from part of the gene. These partial transcripts, known as EST's (expressed sequence tags), could be used to identify the gene-coding regions on the DNA from which they came.

Dr. Venter's use of EST's had two eventful consequences. One was that Dr. Bernadine Healy, then director of the National Institutes of Health, decided to apply for patents on the genes he had found, a move strongly opposed by Dr. James Watson, director of the N.I.H.'s human genome office. The issue was among one of several differences with Dr. Healy that led to Dr. Watson's resignation from that office in 1992.

The other consequence was that Dr. Venter's work caught the eye of a venture capitalist, Dr. Wallace Steinberg, who wanted to start a gene-finding company -- with Dr. Venter as its head. But Dr. Venter insisted on a nonprofit venture, so Dr. Steinberg set him up in the nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research supported by a new company, Human Genome Sciences.

At his new institute, Dr. Venter generated thousands of EST's to the human genome. These became the intellectual property of Human Genome Sciences which, under Dr. William Haseltine, has developed far-reaching claims to many medical genes of interest.

Dr. Venter then spotted another frontier where the DNA sequencing machines might break ground, that of sequencing the genomes of bacteria. The N.I.H.'s human genome project was then working on E. coli, a widely studied bacterium, but progress was slow.

In a prelude to later events with the human genome, Dr. Venter figured he could be first to decode a bacterium with a novel method called the shotgun technique. He applied for an N.I.H. grant but started the project with other money. When it was almost complete, he has said, he received a letter from the N.I.H. rejecting his application because, in the view of an expert committee, it would not work.

The committee included scientists involved in the N.I.H.'s part of the public consortium. Their rejection of Dr. Venter's idea set the pattern of an adversarial relationship that has continued until the last few weeks.

Haemophilus influenzae, whose genome Dr. Venter decoded, was the first bacterium and the first living organism, not counting viruses, to have its full DNA decoded. The result gave scientists their first glimpse into the set of genes necessary for life. And it set off a revolution in medical microbiology, inspiring efforts to decode every major pathogen and learn the microbes' entire playbook for attacking human cells.

In setting up his institute and decoding the Haemophilus genome, Dr. Venter showed he could attract talented people as colleagues. Much of the essential work on Haemophilus was by Dr. Hamilton O. Smith, a Nobel Prize winner, whose contribution Dr. Venter freely acknowledged.

Dr. Venter's technical judgment and organizational abilities appealed to Dr. Michael W. Hunkapiller, president of the company now known as PE Biosystems, which made the leading brand of DNA sequencing machine. When a new, labor-saving generation of his machines was developed, Dr. Hunkapiller figured that a private company using a large suite of the new machines could decode the human genome faster than the government could. He persuaded Dr. Venter to run the company, which came to be known as Celera.

Leaving his institute in friendly hands -- its new president is Dr. Claire Fraser, his wife -- Dr. Venter began Celera in May 1998. His rivals in the public consortium were soon providing him with the psychological stimulus he seemed to need, by pronouncing his human genome decoding strategy certain to fail. Within a few months he had hired a staff, set up a large plant and begun decoding.

Although Celera is in business to make money, principally by selling subscriptions to its genomic data base, Dr. Venter seems eager for the academic world's approval and has continued to publish scientific articles, maintaining a presence in both the science and business worlds.

Dr. Venter became wealthy when he left the N.I.H. to set up the Institute for Genomic Research, and superwealthy when he became president of Celera. But apart from indulging his passion for sailing, he has not let sudden riches divert him from his path. Whether in working on EST's to pull out the genes, decoding the first pathogenic bacteria, or racing to complete the human genome, he has been driven by getting practical results. Celera's corporate motto, that ''Speed Matters'' for treating disease, is a little hokey but reflects Dr. Venter's consistent focus.

''It has always been Craig's view that what is important is not some abstract view of the genome but its utility,'' said Dr. David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. ''Craig has always pushed in the right direction, and the public program needed pushing. When he started Celera it made the public program open their eyes and take a different approach.''

Who's Who on Celera's Team

• MICHAEL HUNKAPILLER

  • • Dr. Michael Hunkapiller, 51, is a co-inventor of the first DNA sequencing machine, and is now president of PE Biosystems, a subsidiary of the PE Corporation. He estimated that a company using a dedicated suite of his most recent model, the Prism 3700, could obtain the human genome sequence faster than the public consortium of academic centers, and persuaded Dr. J. Craig Venter to head the project. At a stroke, Dr. Hunkapiller thus doubled the market for his $300,000 machines.

• HAMILTON O. SMITH

  • • Dr. Hamilton Smith, 68, shared the Nobel Prize in 1978 for the discovery of restriction enzymes, a kind of molecular scissors used by bacteria to cut up threatening viruses and by biologists as an essential tool for manipulating DNA. Dr. Smith is a major scientific player in Dr. Venter's operations. He has the critical task of preparing the libraries of cloned DNA fragments for the DNA sequencing machines to work on. Dr. Venter has made no secret of his reliance on Dr. Smith's work.

• EUGENE W. MYERS

  • • Dr. Eugene Myers is a computer scientist and a leader in the new field of bioinformatics, or computational genomics, the designing of computer programs to analyze the genome. In 1996 he and a colleague proposed the whole genome shotgun method of sequencing the human genome, an idea rejected by the public consortium. Dr. Venter, who had used the shotgun method before, embraced the idea and hired Dr. Myers, who has written the programs for assembling and analyzing Celera's human genome.

• MARK D. ADAMS

  • • Dr. Mark Adams, 37, is another key member of Celera's scientific team. His major role is to see that the whole operation -- DNA libraries and clone-handling robots and DNA sequencing machines -- produces the range and quality of data required by Dr. Myers for his genome assembly program.

• TONY LEE WHITE

  • • The chief executive of the PE Corporation, Tony White, 54, is the architect of Celera. He was the one who bought Dr. Hunkapiller's human genome idea and made the bold decision to convert Perkin Elmer, a traditional scientific instrument maker, into a genomics company. Selling off the instruments and even the Perkin Elmer name, Mr. White has organized the PE Corporation into two main divisions, Celera and PE Biosystems. Celera's aim is to become a genomic database; PE Biosystems sells DNA sequencing machines, to the public consortium as well as to Celera.

The hidden man in the saga of the human genome, the gent whose photograph was not on the cover of Time magazine last week, is 54-year-old Tony White. He is the Cuban-born businessman who two years ago, through shrewd investing, precipitated the acrimonious race between public scientists and private entrepreneurs that ended last week in the East Room of the White House.

White belongs in the promoter’s hall-of-fame, along with Bofors, Krupp, Vickers, Zaheroff, and others who got rich selling arms to both sides of an arms race.

As chief executive of PE Corp., White last year put molecular biologist J. Craig Venter in the genome business, leasing him 300 of the DNA sequencers that PE Biosystems makes and sells for $300,000 apiece.

White then quickly booked a similar number of orders from government labs that, having begun sequencing as a public project in 1995 at a more stately pace, suddenly found themselves in a desperate race with Venter for priority.

“Speed matters” it says in faux Da Vinci notebook script on the Celera home page, and by now the Venter story has been relatively well-ventilated.

How Venter drifted until a tour of duty deciding who among the wounded to treat first as a Navy hospital corpman during the Tet offensive in Vietnam turned him on to life. How he earned a PhD in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego in 1976. How as an ambitious and inventive gene-hunter, he couldn’t persuade the National Institutes of Health to fund various increasingly clever hurry-up drills.

Less well-understood is Tony White’s story, though a Forbes magazine cover story last February hit the nail on the head.

There was no fancy business school for White. Born in Havana to an American father and a Cuban mother, he was raised in straightened circumstances in Ashville, N.C. In 1969 he graduated from Western Carolina University and took a job with health care giant Baxter International in Little Rock, Ark.

White’s first job was peddling surgical gloves and intravenous supplies to hospitals, he told Norm Alster of Investors Business Daily in 1997. Such goods ordinarily sold on price. But as a student of reimbursement schemes, White discovered that hopitals were compensated by the government for their purchases on cost plus a percentage of the cost; in other words, they had an incentive to buy the most expensive gear. Baxter International began to seriously differentiate its products.

Twenty years later White was executive vice president of the global giant, behind chief executive Vernon Loucks. “Maybe I didn’t have the right pedigree,” he told Forbes. “I hadn’t been to business school, my father hadn’t been a big CEO. Or maybe I was too aggressive and just didn’t have the style.” In any event, White did not figure he would be moving up, and when a curiously loaded technology laggard named Perkin-Elmer asked him in 1995 to be chief executive in 1995, he went.

Perkin-Elmer had hit the front pages in 1989, when Japan’s Nikon Corp. sought to buy it. The Norwalk, Conn., technology conglomerate was among the nation’s largest vendors of the sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing machines known as photolithographic steppers and alligners. Its biggest customer was IBM.

The sale was prevented; the value of the yen soon collapsed against the dollar. But Perkin-Elmer continued to show indifferent financial results until 1995. Then executives of hedge fund operator George Soros and money management firm Neuberger & Berman took an interest in the company, and White was hired by the board.

White knew a goldmine when he saw it. Tucked away among Perkin-Elmer’s assets was a little California company, Applied Biosystems. White announced to his first annual meeting that he would use capital liberally to finance its growth. Over the next several years, he shed most of its old core businesses (and even the Perkin-Elmer name), creating instead a holding company known as PE Corp. possessing, at first, a single asset.

Applied Biosystems had started in the early 1980s by a couple of California of Institute of Technology professors, Leroy Hood and Michael Hunkapiller (and several others) with a view to manufacturing a gene-sequencing machine they had invented.

The laser-driven, highly computerized optical reader would dramatically speed up the process of gene assay by automating it, they thought. The sequencer would revolutionize biology in the same way that atom-smashers had revolutionized physics, they claimed. And, in due course, it did precisely that.

In 1992 Hood was lured to the University of Washington by a $12 million gift to create a molecular biology department from Microsoft’s Bill Gates, proving that there are even more tempting opportunities in genomics than selling gene-sequencers. Michael Hunkapiller stayed on to run the company. And it was Hunkapiller who in 1998 persuaded Tony White to hire Craig Venter to begin an all-out race against the government.

The Human Genome Project had been launched in 1990, precisely to take advantage of the development of the new automatic sequencing machines. Initially the effort to map and sequence a complete set of human chromosomes was to take 15 years. Advances in mapping techniques — in particular an approach known as the whole-genome shotgun method, pioneered but not invented by Venter — moved the timetable up.

By 1998, Venter was champing at the bit to put his ideas into practice. But the NIH continued to channel its funds through the five major centers of the government effort. So when White approached Venter with the offer of enough start-up capital to support 300 around-the-clock machines — and 5 percent of the company to boot — Venter quickly agreed.

Celera Genomics Corp. (the latin root means speed) was born, on May 8, 1998. Overnight PE Biosystems had acquired a sibling business unit, a new best friend, and biggest customer.

After an offer to the government to cooperate in publishing its data (presumably with eventual scientific recognition in mind,) Venter announced that Celera itself would sequence the entire human genome by 2001, for around a tenth the cost of the public project.

The company said it would withhold its data just long enough to give its investors a first look at potential genomic “waterfront property” to which they might stake a claim. The public project, in contrast, posted its data on the World Wide Web for all to see at the end of every day.

“The day after we announced Celera, we set off an arms race,” White later crowed to Forbes. “Everyone, including the government, had to retool, and that meant buying our equipment.” And the rest is history. The government bought more machines and speeded up its efforts. The new techniques worked even better than has been forecast. And the mapping milestone of a “working draft” was celebrated in Washington last last week.

Where’s the public purpose in all this?

On its surface, the genome story seems designed to illustrate one of the oldest of all American homilies: the virtues of extreme decentralization. An entrepreneur here is free to go into business for him or herself, over the objections of the chain of command, even in competition with the government. Expert opinion may get it wrong. Hierarchy may be stifling. Competition benefits Americans, especially in a race or a war. All this is true, as far as it goes.

In fact, the story points to a deeper moral, in an opposite direction. Last week’s ceremony, to which Tony White was invited, in which Venter appeared at center stage with arch-rival Francis Collins of the NIH’s Human Genome Research Institute, didn’t just happen, after all. There had to be a certain amount of cooperation and knuckling-under — the details of which may take years to come out.

The White House gala was brokered by the elders of the scientific establishment, an effort that began a year ago with a call to PE’s Tony White from Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lever presumably was a piece of a Nobel Prize. The intense behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort ended with the benediction pronounced last week by President Clinton:  “When we get all this worked out and we are all living to be 150 — young people will still fall in love, old people will still fight about things that should have been resolved 50 years ago — we will all, on occasion, do stupid things, and we will all see the unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. This is a great day.”

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.".