Human genome. Storm erupts over terms for publishing Celera's sequence.

A dispute has been raging behind the scenes for weeks over the conditions under which Celera Genomics is prepared to make its human genome sequence data publicly available. The argument went public on 6 December, when geneticist Michael Ashburner e-mailed an open letter to Science's board of reviewing editors and members of the press slamming an agreement on data release that Science had reached with Celera as a condition for accepting its paper for review. This spat is the latest round in an intense rivalry between Celera president J. Craig Venter and leaders of the Human Genome Project, a publicly funded consortium that has produced its own draft human genome sequence.