  An interim victory for the publicly-funded project followed when, on schedule, the first animal sequence, that of C. elegans with 97 million bases and 19,099 genes, was published in Science in December 1998 (C. elegans Sequencing Consortium 1998). This was the product of a 10-year collaboration between scientists at Washington University (headed by Bob Waterston) and the Sanger Centre (headed by John Sulston), carried out at a semi-industrial scale with more than 200 people employed in each lab working around the clock. In March 1999, the main players—the NHGRI, Sanger Centre, and DOE—advanced the date of completion of the “working draft”: five-fold coverage of at least 90 percent of the genome was to be completed by the following spring (Pennisi 1999; Wadman 1999). This change reflected improved output of the new model of automated sequencing machines, diminished sequencing costs at $.20 to $.30 per base, and the desire to speed up the release of medically relevant data. NHGRI would take responsibility for 60 percent of the sequence, concentrating these efforts at only three centers with Baylor, Washington University, and Whitehead-MIT sharing $81.6 million over the ensuing 10 months; 33 percent of the sequence would be the responsibility of the Sanger Centre whose funds from Wellcome increased from $57 million to $77 million for the year; and the remaining sequence would be supplied by the DOE's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, CA into which its three centers had merged in January 1997. The smaller international centers involved in sequencing were not consulted on this restructuring, but were later brought on board on the condition that they could keep up with the pace. The first chromosomes to be completed (and this was to finished, not working draft, standards) were the two smallest: the sequence for chromosome 22 was published by scientists at the Sanger Centre and partners at University of Oklahoma, Washington University in St. Louis and Keio University in Japan in December 1999 (Dunham et al. 1999); the sequence for chromosome 21 was published by an international consortium of mostly Japanese and German labs—half at RIKEN—in May 2000 (Hattori et al. 2000). The remaining chromosomes lagged behind, though the DOE announced completion of working drafts of chromosomes 5, 16, and 19 with three-fold coverage in April 2000. The progress made by the publicly-funded project could be monitored because sequence data were released at 24-hour intervals, but Celera's progress was more difficult to assess. HGP scientist Maynard Olson charged that Celera was doing “science by press conference” (in Davies 2002, p. 153). Certainly, Celera's press conferences gave the impression it was ahead in the race: on 10 January 2000 the company announced completion of 90 percent of the human genome sequence, and on 6 April 2000 the company announced completion of three-fold coverage of the DNA of one male donor. But there was also evidence that Celera did remain a threat: the validity of the WGS sequencing approach was demonstrated in March 2000 when Celera and the (publicly-funded) Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project published the sequence of D. melanogaster of about 180 Mb (Adams et al. 2000).