The Human Genome Project always embodied multiple tensions, if not contradictions: public science and funding that seeded private sector initiatives, collaborative data sharing coexisting with competition and ownership, deliberative science and high-throughput technological production. The events leading to the early completion of the human genome sequence, involving the corporation Celera Genomics and the public International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, illuminate in miniature the productive but at times volatile tensions of the public-cum-private efforts over 10 years to map and sequence the genomes of multiple organisms.