What's got no profits and a sky-high stock price? If you said "the latest dot com," guess again. This time it's the dozen leading companies in genomics research. Since December, firms including Gaithersburg, Md.'s Gene Logic and New Haven's CuraGen have seen their stocks soar as investors tune into what scientists have known for a while-genome research is the future of medicine.

Driving the surging stock prices is the impending completion of the international Human Genome Project. In December, academic teams announced that they have decoded one of the 23 human chromosomes, with a rough draft of the rest of the genome to follow this year. And growing media coverage is drawing attention to companies that specialize in interpreting gene data to speed the search for new drugs-a field known as functional genomics.