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| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Nasdaq: CRA | |
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 1998; 27 years ago (1998) |
| Headquarters | Alameda, California, United States |
Key people | |
| Products | Scientific & Technical Instruments |
Number of employees | 554[1] |
| Parent | Quest Diagnostics |
| Website | www |
Celera Corporation is a subsidiary ofQuest Diagnostics which focuses on genetic sequencing and related technologies. It was founded in 1998 as a business unit ofApplera, spun off into an independent company in 2008, and finally acquired byQuest Diagnostics in 2011.[2]
Originally headquartered inRockville,Maryland (relocated toAlameda, California), it was established in May 1998 by PE Corporation (later renamed toApplera), with Dr. J.Craig Venter fromThe Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) as its first president. While at TIGR, Venter andHamilton Smith led the first successful effort tosequence an entire organism'sgenome, that of theHaemophilus influenzaebacterium. Celera was formed for the purpose of generating and commercializing genomic information. Its stock is atracking stock of Applera, along with the tracking stock of Applera's largerApplied Biosystems Group business unit.
Celera sequenced the human genome at a fraction of the cost of the publicly fundedHuman Genome Project (HGP), using about $300 million of private funding versus approximately $3 billion of taxpayer dollars.[citation needed] 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 fromGenBank. Celera's approach, which usedshotgun sequencing, spurred the public HGP to accelerate its effort and shift its projected timetable from 2005 to 2003.[citation needed]
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 theopen access policy for gene sequences from the publicly funded Human Genome Project.[3] 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.[citation needed]
The rise and fall of Celera as an ambitious competitor of the Human Genome Project is the main subject of the bookThe 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 ofNobel laureate SirJohn Sulston in his bookThe Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow also based his 2005 bookA Machine to Make a Future on Celera.
Five years ago, Craig Venter let out a big secret. As president of Celera Genomics, Venter had led the race between his company and a government-funded project to decode the human genome. After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own.
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