The consortium, a public organization funded in the United States by the National Institutes of Health, will publish its results in the journal Nature on Thursday, while Celera Genomics, a privately funded company, will publish its results in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Both organizations made announcements yesterday--several days before the reports will be published--because a British newspaper broke an established embargo and announced the news Sunday.

Leaders from both the consortium and Celera said they were excited for the new research opportunities the completed mapping of the genome-- which is also available on the Internet--will provide.

"This is a momentous occasion for all the scientists around the world who have worked to decode the billions of letters that make up the human genome," said J. Craig Venter, president of Celera.

"This announcement represents the end of the beginning for the Human Genome Project," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in a press conference yesterday.

Members of the Harvard community said they were excited about the project's findings, which overturned some standard assumptions.

"I was surprised by the small number of genes they discovered," said Joshua LaBaer, an instructor in medicine and director of the Harvard Institute for Proteomics.