When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair).
Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald.
A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time..
A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work.
RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!
I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.
He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.
He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.
Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2].
1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity
Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.
"Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable.
So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:
Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly.
The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.
I worked on this back in the 90s and there multiple data sets being used. We had one that was Mennonite family with like 5 living generations and 100ish individuals.
It gets a little fuzzy when talking about Celera and the human genome project. The two efforts were very much competitors, but there was a lot of crossover (mainly from Celera pulling in the public data).
But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it).
> After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1]
I am not sure what is "the draft human genome" you are talking about. Two separate human genomes were published in 2001: the HGP genome and the celera genome. The HGP genome then didn't use Venter DNA. It evolved into the current human reference genome. The celera genome contained Venter DNA but it has been completely forgotten nowadays.
Sad news. I met Craig very briefly at a conference probably a decade back. I pretty much was a self-study in genetics at the time... so let's just say I wasn't in Craig's league. Despite this he was very engaged and took the time for a very thoughtful chat.
I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there.
He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.
iiuc it was hamilton smith who insisted that shotgun sequencing would work. the nih side insisted on primer walking until celera started assembling the genome so rapidly that the nih had to get in on shotgun too
> in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it).
I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.
i worked for ham smith and my understanding through him is that both sides relied on data that the other produced.
here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/
I just read your comment and also just discovered that I have aphantasia.
Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.
I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.
When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair).
Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald.
A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time..
A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work.
RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!
I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.
He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.
He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.
Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2].
1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity
2: https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/
Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.
"Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable.
So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:
https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com...
i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him
Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly.
The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.
I worked on this back in the 90s and there multiple data sets being used. We had one that was Mennonite family with like 5 living generations and 100ish individuals.
You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample.
It gets a little fuzzy when talking about Celera and the human genome project. The two efforts were very much competitors, but there was a lot of crossover (mainly from Celera pulling in the public data).
But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it).
> After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1]
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/04/223919/craig-ven...
I am not sure what is "the draft human genome" you are talking about. Two separate human genomes were published in 2001: the HGP genome and the celera genome. The HGP genome then didn't use Venter DNA. It evolved into the current human reference genome. The celera genome contained Venter DNA but it has been completely forgotten nowadays.
Yes, his was the first complete genome ever sequenced (by a private entity).
This reminds me of the interesting fact that
> Linnaeus is designated as the type specimen for the human species, Homo sapiens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus
Sad news. I met Craig very briefly at a conference probably a decade back. I pretty much was a self-study in genetics at the time... so let's just say I wasn't in Craig's league. Despite this he was very engaged and took the time for a very thoughtful chat.
RIP Craig Venter.
I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there.
Thank you Craig Venter!
He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.
iiuc it was hamilton smith who insisted that shotgun sequencing would work. the nih side insisted on primer walking until celera started assembling the genome so rapidly that the nih had to get in on shotgun too
No, at initial release, the human genome from the NIH side was done by bac-to-bac, not by shotgun.
> in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it).
I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.
i worked for ham smith and my understanding through him is that both sides relied on data that the other produced.
here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/
RIP. I absolutely loved the book A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter.
That's unexpected. He was only 80, and as I understand it still working.
My his memory be a blessing.
I went to a talk of his once and discovered that I also have aphantasia. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy the little I interacted with him. RIP
I just read your comment and also just discovered that I have aphantasia.
Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.
The bad boy of science!
I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.
Oh no! I did an internship at his lab when I went to UCSD. RIP.
Sad news. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk was interesting back in the day
You can definitely say that ego was the fountainhead of progress for him!