"There is an issue that it took us longer to scale up than we thought, so we didn't produce as much in a three year period as we though we would," he said.

According to Gillevet, the lab's initial goal was to sequence one million basepairs, but only about 180,000 have been sequenced so far. Current work, Gillevet said, is proceeding at a rate of 300,00 to 400,000 a year.

Gillevet said the average grant from the National Institutes of Health is about $200,000 for ten people, making Harvard's $2 million grant relatively large. But he added that total funding for the entire Human Genome Project is about $200 million a year, so Harvard was responsible for less than one percent of the total project.

Gilbert said he did not know which universities received the half dozen large grants for the genome project this year.

Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Matthew S. Meselson, also a biochemist, said he was surprised by the news.

"He does awfully good work," Meselson said. "If this means he will do less work, then there will be less good work done in science."

Nevertheless, Meselson said the closing would have "very little effect on Harvard's science departments, citing the wealth of research projects performed on campus.

Gilbert said he still remains a major proponent of the Human Genome Project despite the loss of funding. "The project as a whole is doing well," he said.

Now that the grant has expired, Gilbert said he will concentrate his attention on the work from his other lap, which studies the cell development of zebrafish, a common species of inquiry for many biologists