The drug maker: William Haseltine

A brilliant scientist, self-styled Renaissance man and multimillionaire socialite, Dr William A Haseltine is Chief Executive of private company Human Genome Sciences (HGS), based in Rockville, Maryland, US.

Liked by few, and regarded by many as arrogant, impatient, and possessing a "titanic ego", Dr Haseltine is thought of by some as one of the bad boys of genome research.

When once asked if he thought he was playing God, he replied: "I wish I were".

HGS is a pharmaceutical company, using genome data to develop new drugs.

Intellectual property

Among the genes patented by his company is the gene for CCR5, the receptor used by the Aids virus to enter human cells. Human Genome Sciences demands licences and royalties from anyone who works on it.

Dr Haseltine was born in 1944. His father was a physicist at the Naval Weapons Center in California. His mother was a suicidal manic-depressive. She told her son that he was one of the first people to have been saved by penicillin - a bout of pneumonia when he was four months old nearly killed him.

Dr Haseltine was a "very serious" freshman at Berkeley in 1962, wearing a jacket and tie to lectures. He was selected by his chemistry tutor as one of the brightest 15 students, and invited to have weekly lunches with Nobel laureates.

For his biophysics PhD, Dr Haseltine went to Harvard, and he stayed on to teach, becoming an expert in retroviruses.

Personality clashes

In 1982, together with colleagues, he came up with the then controversial hypothesis that Aids was caused by a retrovirus - he was later proved correct.

In 1992, after 17 years at Harvard, Dr Haseltine met Craig Venter. It took him "ten minutes to see the future" and the two formed a commercial partnership to sequence the human genome. However, personality clashes led them to separate in 1997.

Dr Haseltine is married to the glamorous creator of "Giorgio" perfume and enjoys buying expensive artwork and mingling with Hollywood actors and senators.

But he says he is happiest working in his laboratory and curing disease.

By Emma Young