On a day of vivid hues last fall, an anxious group of architects, contractors, engineers and scientists gathered in the basement of a building in Rockville, Md. The structure was supposed to be converted by year's end into the greatest DNA sequencing factory in the world, but the planning meeting confirmed that problems were piling up. Delivery of a crucial steam generator had fallen behind. And it wasn't even clear that the walls of the 113,000-square-foot office building, which had been occupied by a defense contractor but now stood gutted, would accommodate all the pipes and wires needed to run the new laboratories.

The contractors were uneasy, but if the scientists present in the room weren't overflowing with sympathy, it was because they had set themselves an even bigger task with an even more dramatic timeline. The researchers work for Celera Genomics Corp., a company formed last May with plans to decode by 2001 all the 3.5 billion chemical letters of DNA that make up human heredity. Celera intends not only to beat by four years the target date originally set by the publicly funded Human Genome Project (which began in 1990), but also to finish the job for a tenth of the government project's $3 billion price tag.