Chris May

I am writing a paper for where I am supposed to defend the claim that Whole Genome Shotgun Sequencing was successful at mapping the human genome.

In the research I have done, I have come across a bunch of papers from the late 90s from people on both sides (e.g. Venter/Myers PRO, Green
AGAINST).

It seem then after the release of the human genome, there again a number of papers looking at the results, kind of doing a post mortem on the whole debate.

However, these articles seem to indicate that WGS would NOT have worked in the human genome, where such a large portion of the genome is a duplicate, if not for the IHGP teams work.  Some papers seemed to suggest that this hybrid method would be the standard way to sequence genes.

I have not found much on the subject from recent months.  Almost all
my references are from 2002 or earlier.

I tried posting to some newsgroups for some opinions and got back nada.

I must not be looking in the right spots, but it sure is frustrating.

UPDATE: After more research, it appears that the reason I was finding so many articles complaining about the WGS method was due to the massive egos that were seeing their Nobel prize dreams going up in smoke.  Venter and Myers successfully used WGS on the mouse genome, and then later applied it again to human, without any data from GenBank, validating the results, and the technique.