WASHINGTON, March 29 – Cutting the Department of Energy’s budget could prevent the launch of the “Genomes to Life” initiative originally scheduled to begin in 2002, Daniel Drell, a senior official at the DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research, said Thursday.

Although OBER Director Ari Patrinos has pledged to protect genomics research as much as possible, President George W. Bush has proposed trimming the DOE’s 2002 budget while new spending initiatives in non-research areas are being launched, indicating that genomics spending will face a tight squeeze.