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On 26 June 2000, J. Craig Venter accompanied then US president Bill Clinton and geneticist Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project (HGP), into the East Room of the White House to celebrate the completion of the first draft of the human genome. The cordiality on show belied the fierce ‘genome wars’ that had been ongoing since Venter announced his ambition to launch a commercial competitor to the publicly funded, international HGP. He has died, aged 79.
Venter was involved in many other genomics milestones, including the first published bacterial genome in 1995, the first individual diploid human genome sequence in 2007 and the first synthetic cell in 2010. Many people thought of Venter as an innovative scientist and entrepreneur, demonstrating the power of capitalism. But for others, he became public enemy number one, sometimes called Darth Venter, intent on patenting genomic data for commercial gain.
Genome pioneer Craig Venter dies: here’s how he transformed science
Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1946. A self-confessed beach bum, he spent a harrowing year serving in the Vietnam War — “M*A*S*H without the jokes and pretty women”, he recalled — conducting medical triage as an enlisted member of the US Navy. Returning to the United States, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and a PhD in physiology and pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. By 1984, he was running a laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, searching for genes associated with neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
From the moment that Venter owned his first automated DNA-sequencing instrument in 1987, he was hooked. In 1991, his group published a landmark paper (M. D. Adams et al. Science 252, 1651–1656; 1991) identifying hundreds of mammalian genes through the use of ‘expressed sequence tags’ — fragments of genes generated from messenger RNA templates. He was soon embroiled in controversy, because Venter and the NIH elected to patent some of these fragments before their function was known. This led James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and then director of the HGP, to resign.
In 1992, Venter founded the non-profit Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, which became a magnet for a host of talented researchers. Together with the institute’s commercial partner, biopharmaceutical company Human Genome Sciences (HGS), Venter embarked on building a directory of almost 300,000 human gene fragments. Venter and William Haseltine, then chief executive of HGS, posed for the cover of Business Week as “The Gene Kings”.
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Venter’s team captured more headlines in 1995, when it published the first complete genome sequence of an entire organism, Haemophilus influenzae (R. D. Fleischmann et al. Science 269, 496–512; 1995), followed by more microbial genomes. Venter also popularized the concept of the minimal genome — the smallest collection of genes that can sustain life.
In early 1998, just over halfway through the HGP, Michael Hunkapiller, then president of instrument manufacturer Applied Biosystems, approached Venter about launching a private sequencing enterprise in competition with the HGP. Venter’s company, named Celera Genomics, aimed to sequence the human genome faster and at a lower cost than the international consortium.