Craig Venter of Human Genome Project Dies at 79
economist.comHe wasn't from the human genome project. He (in)famously led a competing company (Celera Genomics) that was trying to use shotgun sequencing to do the same thing as the official project, but "faster".
It was a fairly big controversy at the time, because it wasn't clear you could do shotgun assembly of a genome the size of the human genome without the scaffolding that the official project put in place, and also...the company was trying to get the genome "first" so that it could file patents. It all seems a little quaint now, given how little immediately actionable information came out of the genome effort, but it was the OpenAI vs Anthropic of the late 90s.
Also, for what it's worth, my recollection is that the Venter genome is actually...Craig Venter's genome.
> It was a fairly big controversy at the time, because it wasn't clear you could do shotgun assembly of a genome the size of the human
The main controversy was indirect, e. g. several actors - including Craig - trying to patent ESTs. That scaffolding was possible was already shown before, e. g. Haemophilus influenzae in 1995: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7542800/
Shotgun assembly was not as controversial, just a more efficient divide-and-conquer approach that was mostly new-ish at the time.
> It all seems a little quaint now, given how little immediately actionable information came out of the genome effort
Well - you have the sequence, but the sequence alone does not necessarily tell everything. You just have more information than before.
> The main controversy was indirect, e. g. several actors - including Craig - trying to patent ESTs.
You're under-selling it. Celera filed thousands of patents on expressed sequence tags, long before anyone knew anything about them. It was a land grab.
Also, it only seems obvious if you're looking back at it with 20+ years of hindsight, but it was quite unclear at the time if it was possible to obtain a full read of the genome from shotgun sequencing alone. The human genome is 3000x larger than H. influenzae, and significantly more complex.
They did not get a full read either
He was also, in my experience, a bit of a jerk. As an undergrad I asked him "with oligo synthesis improving is there any way we stop bad actors from making recombinant pathogens?" His reply was "we can start by arresting people like you." My advisor worked with him at Celera and a decade on the amount of acrimony towards the public project was palpable.
With that and his Human Longevity company, he sounds like high level grifter.
It feels like a lot of the folks who occupy the same biotechnologist genre as Venter (George Church, Eric Lander, etc.) can come off this way. I agree fully about the grifty nature of aging and longevity research (mostly because of the target audience), but I also think that you need an element of this willingness to entertain ideas that are borderline crazy to get to their status in the first place. Proposing to sequence (or, perhaps more timely—edit) the human genome would have seemed like a wild idea in the 80s, and yet they were thinking about it.
The end of this short interview with Stuart Schreiber has a similar vibe:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41570-026-00803-0
Note how interested he is in consciousness and AGI. This is something that he's been talking about for a long time, just formulated differently. You need to be able to temper true scientific rigor with a little bit of wackiness to even think about tackling these big questions.
Also from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957101 (83 comments)
The headline "Craig Ventrr of Human Genome Project Dies at 79" is extreme misinformation.
Venter was the enemy of the Human Genome Project, he swept in late, after much discovery had been made and technology developed, and most of the data was generated. And he was going to add a tine bit of new data and then patent it so that the dream of a publicly usable human genome was impossible.
Venter was an important figure that did many good things, but his involvement with the human genome was entirely negative.
Strong disagree (I'm a computational genomicist). The "official" Human Genome Project was in a rut, doing incredibly inefficient and scientifically uninteresting chromosome walking techniques and would have taken years or even a decade more to do it the old school way. You can argue against Celera's business model (which failed anyway), but the whole reason we got the human genome when we did was the fact that Celera showed that shotgun genomics (assembling reads computationally rather than relying on physical overlaps) could work even on the human genome. And that was the future of genomics. Venter did a great service to the human and all genome projects by pushing new techniques.
science advances one funeral at a time