Imagine that when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface for the first time in July of 1969 to plant the American flag and proclaim "one giant leap for mankind," he found that a number of companies and universities had gotten there first and divvied up the moon for themselves. Not only had they quietly laid claims to the most promising parcels of lunar real estate, but they had done so with the blessings of the U.S. government.

Sound absurd? Well, that's the fate of the 10-year, multibillion-dollar effort to decipher the human genetic code. In June, amid much fanfare, the directors of the publicly funded Human Genome Project and executives at Celera Genomics, a Rockville, Md.-based startup, announced they had separately finished sequencing most of the three billion DNA letters that comprise the human genome-the so-called "Book of Life." This rough draft of the human genome, the leaders of the decade-long public effort proclaimed proudly, represents an invaluable resource free for use by all humanity in its quest to diagnose and cure diseases.