The breakup earlier this week of a partnership that pioneered commercial DNA research is expected to lead to public release of a stream of genetics data. William Haseltine and J. Craig Venter, who graced the cover of Business Week as the "Gene Kings" in 1995, are going their separate ways. Haseltine's medical product development firm, Human Genome Sciences Inc. (HGS) in Rockville, Maryland, and Venter's nonprofit DNA sequencing center, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, effectively ended business relations on 20 June. TIGR will relinquish more than $38 million which it was due to receive from HGS over the next 5 years. And HGS will release TIGR from patent requirements and publishing delays on future research. However, HGS retains rights to TIGR's earlier work.

The divorce was long in the making. HGS and TIGR were joined together in 1992 when the pharmaceutical company Smith-Kline Beecham invested $125 million in the two outfits to finance a hunt for human genes, the first big industrial leap into genomics. From the start, however, Venter chafed under commercial limits on data publication. HGS's attempts to delay the release of microbial sequencing data raised tensions to the boiling point. Last winter, HGS and TIGR began discussing a split-up (Science, 7 February, p. 778); formal talks began 2 months ago.

"This was an amicable decision," says Haseltine, one in "our mutual best interests." He says HGS was getting "diminishing returns" from its investment in TIGR, since Venter had steered his outfit into sequencing organisms of little medical importance, and into human genome sequencing, also of limited commercial value. Venter, on the other hand, says that even at a cost of $38 million, TIGR's new freedom is "worth every penny." Venter is celebrating by releasing raw DNA sequence data from 11 microorganisms, including chromosome 2 of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.