The hidden man in the saga of the human genome.

The hidden man in the saga of the human genome, the gent whose photograph was not upon the cover of Time magazine last week, is 54- year-old Tony White. He is the Cuban-born businessman who brace years ago, through shrewd investing, precipitated the acrimonious race between public scientists and private entrepreneur that expirationed last week in the East swing of the White House.

White belongs in the promoter's hall-of-fame, along with Bofors, Krupp Vickers, Zaheroff, and others who got rich selling arms to the couple sides of an arms race.

As chief executive of PE Corp., White last year inflict molecular biologist J. Craig uterus in the genome business, leasing him 300 of the DNA sequencer that PE Biosystems makes and take a bribe fors for $300,000 apiece.

White then quickly worked a similar number of orders from direction labs that, having begun sequencing as a public devise in 1995 at a more stately pace, abruptly found themselves in a desperate race with matrix for priority.

"Spe matters" it says in faux Da Vinci notebook script forward the Celera home page, and from now the Venter story has been relatively well-ventilated.

for what cause Venter drifted until a tour of impost deciding who among the hurted to treat first as a Navy hospital corpman during the Tet offensive in Vietnam deflected him on to life. for what reason he earned a PhD in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego in 1976 in what manner as an ambitious and inventive gene-hunter he couldn't persuade the National Institutes of Health to supply various increasingly clever hurry-up drills.

Les well-understood is Tony White's story, although a Forbes magazine cover story last February hit the nail upon the head.

There was no fancy business train for White. Born in Havana to an American father and a Cuban mother, he was raised in straightened circumstances in Ashville, NC In 1969 he graduated from Western Carolina University and took a piece of work with health care giant Baxter International in Little support Ark.

White's first piece of work was peddling surgical gloves and intravenous supplies to hospitals, he told Norm Alster of Investors Business Daily in 1997 of that kind goods ordinarily sold on price. unless as a student of reimbursement schemes, White discovered that hopitals were compensated by the agency of the government for their purchases forward cost plus a percentage of the cost; in other words, they had an incentive to corrupt the most expensive gear. Baxter International began to seriously differentiate its works

Twenty years later White was executive vice president of the global giant, behind chief executive Vernon Louck "Maybe I didn't have the right pedigree," he told Forbes. "I hadn't been to business exercise my father hadn't been a big CEO Or maybe I was too aggressive and just didn't have the style" In any fact White did not figure he would be moving up and when a curiously loaded technology laggard named Perkin-Elmer asked him in 1995 to be chief executive in 1995 he went.

Perkin-Elmer had hit the effrontery pages in 1989, when Japan's Nikon Corp. sought to corrupt it. The Norwalk, Conn., technology conglomerate was among the nation's largest vendors of the sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing machines known as photolithographic stepper and alligners. Its biggest customer was IBM.

The sale was prevented; the value of the yen shortly collapsed against the dollar. however Perkin-Elmer continued to show indifferent financial conclusions until 1995. Then executives of hedge store operator George Soros and currency management firm Neuberger & Berman took an interest in the company, and White was hired by way of the board.

White knew a goldmine when he saw it. small sworded away among Perkin- Elmer's assets was a little California company, Applied Biosystems. White announced to his first annual meeting that he would use capital liberally to finance its sprouting Over the next several years, he shed mostly of its old core businesses (and steady the Perkin-Elmer name), creating instead a holding company known as PE Corp. possessing, at first, a single asset.

Applied Biosystems had started in the early 1980 at a couple of California of Institute of Technology professors, Leroy cowl and Michael Hunkapiller (and several others) with a view to manufacturing a gene-sequencing machine they had invented.

The laser-driven, highly computerized optical reader would dramatically spe up the proces of gene assay on automating it, they thought. The sequencer would revolutionize biology in the same way that atom-smashers had revolutionized physics, they claimed. And, in appropriate course, it did precisely that.

In 1992 shelter was lured to the University of Washington by way of a $12 million gift to create a molecular biology department from Microsoft's Bill Gates, proving that there are equal more tempting opportunities in genomics than selling gene-sequencer Michael Hunkapiller stayed forward to run the company. And it was Hunkapiller who in 1998 persuaded Tony White to hire Craig womb to begin an all- public race against the government.