Biologists at Harvard reacted with exuberance to the announcement earlier this week that a draft of the human genome has been completed.

"Its a giant symbolic step for us in terms of modern biology," said Joshua LaBaer, Instructor in Medicine and Director of the Harvard Institute for Proteomics.

Harvard has been more of a bystander than a participant in the sequencing phase of the genome project.

Sequencing DNA on the whole genome scale is a massive industrial effort that requires large amounts of expensive equipment--much of which Harvard does not have.

According to Gavin MacBeath, a fellow at the Center for Genomics Research, each sequencing center would have "150 of these half million sequencing machines that we have a couple of."

Twelve centers are dedicated to the project, with several located out of the country.

Many of these centers are linked with universities engaged in technical development of sequencing technology, such as MIT. Technological development of this sort has not been a focus of research on this side of Cambridge.

Now that the sequence data is available, however, Harvard is engaged in several large-scale projects to organize it and to develop technologies that allow for DNA copies of genes to be accessed readily by researchers.