J. Craig Venter: the American scientist who changed biotech

J. Craig Venter was a “risk-taking outsider” who “brought speed, competition and controversy to one of science’s biggest races”, says The New York Times – the quest to decode the human genome. A former surfer and Vietnam veteran turned medical researcher, Venter combined a brilliant scientific mind with the single-minded drive of an entrepreneur. Having decided in the 1990s that the US government’s $3 billion Human Genome Project (HGP) was moving at a snail’s pace, he took the gamble that “he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method”, launching a private company, Celera Genomics, as his vehicle. A decade later, he made another significant breakthrough, creating the world’s first synthetic bacterial cell.

“The idea of commercialising the genome was extremely unpopular in the scientific community,” says The Telegraph. Nicknamed “Darth Venter”, he was demonised by critics. But Venter relished the controversy – “flashing his Learjet, yacht and Rolex, and his ability to raise $1 billion on the New York stock market in a single day” when he floated Celera in February 2000 at the height of the biotechnology boom. Celera pioneered a technique called “shotgun sequencing”, says Chemistry World: the idea was to randomly cut up the genome into fragments, sequence them, and then use a supercomputer to work out how the pieces related to one another. The method was faster and cheaper than the HGP’s approach of slogging systematically through the genome. Indeed, the privately backed company took two years to achieve what the HGP had been trying to do for 14 years, says The Times. “The scramble ended in a photo finish” with the two sides jointly announcing their success at a press conference presided over by Bill Clinton in 2000. Crucially, by publishing the full sequence, the HGP undermined Venter’s plans to register patent rights.

J. Craig Venter was a brash entrepreneur

Often described as “the alpha male of US science”, J. Craig Venter was an extremely competitive character, noted the Financial Times in 2007. Born in 1946, into a military family and brought up in Millbrae, California, he was an unruly youth who dropped out of high school to become a surfer before being called up to serve in Vietnam in 1967. Venter returned to the US with a new interest in medical research, earning a degree in biochemistry from the University of California, followed by a doctorate, says The Telegraph. He began working on gene sequencing in the 1980s at the US National Institutes of Health, later co-founding the nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research, with his then-wife, genomicist Claire Fraser.

J. Craig Venter was not an easy man to work with, says Chemistry World. Just over a year after his human genome coup, he was fired by Celera because of internal conflicts, but continued to drive genome sequencing forward via a new non-profit, the J. Craig Venter Institute. Having banked a considerable sum from listing Celera, he continued creating firms – and landing in trouble over them, says The Guardian. He co-founded Synthetic Genomics to advance the technology in vaccines, biofuels and medicines. In 2013 he launched Human Longevity Inc, only later to be sued by the firm, says The Times, “over allegations that he pilfered its trade secrets, poached its staff and sought to lure away its investors”. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2016.

By the time of his death last month aged 79, Venter was worth tens of millions of dollars. But he missed out on the bonanza that synthetic biology now promises in “myriad applications”, says The Telegraph. Maverick to the end, he was regarded by detractors as an “opportunistic maniac” – and by admirers as a plucky “genius” who challenged the research establishment and “should have been given a Nobel Prize”.

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