Originally headquartered in
Rockville, Maryland (relocated to
Alameda, California), it was established in May 1998 by PE Corporation (later renamed to
Applera), with Dr. J.
Craig Venter from
The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) as its first president. While at TIGR, Venter and
Hamilton Smith led the first successful effort to
sequence an entire organism's
genome, that of the
Haemophilus influenzae bacterium. Celera was formed for the purpose of generating and commercializing genomic information. Its stock is a
tracking stock of Applera, along with the tracking stock of Applera's larger
Applied Biosystems Group business unit. Celera sequenced the human genome at a fraction of the cost of the publicly funded
Human Genome Project (HGP), using about $300 million of private funding versus approximately $3 billion of taxpayer dollars. However, a significant portion of the human genome had already been sequenced when Celera entered the field, and thus Celera did not incur any costs with obtaining the existing data, which was freely available to the public from
GenBank. Celera's approach, which used
shotgun sequencing, spurred the public HGP to accelerate its effort and shift its projected timetable from 2005 to 2003. Critics of initial efforts by Celera Genomics to hold back data from sections of genome they sequenced for commercial exploitation felt that it would retard progress in science as a whole. These critics pointed to the
open access policy for gene sequences from the publicly funded Human Genome Project. Later, the company changed their policy and made their sequences available for non-commercial use but set a maximum threshold for amount of sequence data that a researcher could download at any given time. The rise and fall of Celera as an ambitious competitor of the Human Genome Project is the main subject of the book
The Genome War by James Shreeve, who followed Venter around for two years in the process of writing the book. A view from the public effort's side is that of
Nobel laureate Sir
John Sulston in his book
The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome. Anthropologist
Paul Rabinow also based his 2005 book
A Machine to Make a Future on Celera. ==Genomes sequenced by Celera Genomics==