“It turns out with the haploid genomes, we missed most of human [genetic] variation,” says Venter, who led the project to decode his own genome at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. But when Venter’s team compared his genome with the results of the government’s Human Genome Project, it found that the degree of similarity may be only 98 to 99 percent. Edward Rubin, director of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, says Venter’s project used a relatively old and expensive technology that produced a “Rolls Royce” version of Venter’s genome.