Background

John Craig Venter was born on October 14, 1946, in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. His father was John Venter, an ex-Marine turned accountant. His mother was Elizabeth Venter (née Wisdom) who sold real estate. Craig's brother Gary was a year older than him, and he had two younger siblings, Susie and Keith.

Craig's childhood was characterized by adrenaline and building things. He and his young friends raced their bicycles against passenger jets taking off from San Francisco Airport (these were pre-security fence days) and haunted the railroad tracks, jumping on and off moving freight cars.

Education

In September 1960, age 13, Craig enrolled at Mills High School, Millbrae. He did not enjoy school, and most of his teachers did not enjoy him being at school. He was inattentive in class, talked when his teachers were teaching and spent a lot of time in detention. His grades were usually Cs and Ds. In more recent times, he would probably have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

His prospects improved in the summer of 1962 when a short-lived summer romance with a girl interested in literature and classical music changed Craig's view of the world.

He and his brother Gary joined the school swim team and, after a lot of dedicated training, their team set a new American record. Craig won individual gold medals, set new county records and featured in local newspapers. Despite poor academic grades, his prowess in the pool won him a scholarship to Arizona State University. He did not go.

Instead of going to college, Craig Venter moved out of the family home and headed to southern California. Once there, he spent as much time surfing and partying as he could, working a succession of evening or night jobs to pay the rent. Life was good.

In 1965, however, the good times came to a shattering end. Venter found himself in a Navy boot camp in San Diego. With ever more military personnel needed for the war in Vietnam, he was going to be drafted into the army. Taking the advice of his ex-Marine father, he joined the Navy instead.

The Navy measured Venter's IQ at 142, opening a wide range of Naval career options. He opted for hospital corps school, not realizing that medics were high priority enemy targets.

After completing his training, Venter served in 1967-1968 as a medic at the DaNang Naval Hospital in Vietnam. Often his shifts were a living nightmare of hearing soldiers screaming in pain, treating brain-damaged teenage soldiers, and witnessing amputations, bodies torn to pieces, and a relentless cycle of death. He witnessed hundreds of deaths, with many of his patients dying while he was trying to save them.

In a situation where medics were always in short supply, he needed to decide which patients should be given pain relief and allowed to die and which should get treatment and be given at least a chance to live.

One day, after 5 months at DaNang, it got too much for the 21-year-old medic; he went to the beach and entered the water. He intended to keep swimming outward into the South China Sea until it consumed him. A mile out, he encountered a shark and got frightened. He decided he wanted to live, and he turned back, eventually landing safely.

In August 1968, he returned to America a changed man. After experiencing so much despair and futility, he wanted to do something purposeful with his life. He decided to become a doctor.

Venter's school grades were not good enough to get into a leading university, which was the route to medical school. Instead, he began at the College of San Mateo, a community college. He hoped to transfer to a university for his third and fourth years. San Mateo was only a few miles from his parents' home in Millbrae. Using his Navy medical experience, he easily found work as head of a hospital's cardiac arrest team.

In contrast to his high school days, Venter was now a committed straight-A student, who was overjoyed when the University of California, San Diego accepted him as an advanced student.

At the University of California, Nathan O. Kaplan, an eminent biochemist heard about Venter's previous adventures. He was intrigued enough to ask the recently arrived undergraduate to propose a research project. Venter's idea - to study fight, flight, and adrenaline - was a turning point in his life, carrying him away from his plan to practice medicine and towards scientific research.

Reading the scientific literature about adrenaline he learned that, although there were two competing theories, nobody knew why adrenaline made cells beat faster. Venter told Kaplan he had devised an experiment to finally resolve the issue. Kaplan enthusiastically gave Venter the go-ahead to work in his laboratory with the result that just three years after leaving Vietnam, still an undergraduate, Venter published his first scientific research paper.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1972, aged 25, followed by a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology in 1975, both from the University of California.

Career

In July 1976, Venter joined the School of Medicine at the University of Buffalo, where he immediately formed his own research team, skipping the postdoctoral research worker phase most scientists pass through. At Buffalo he continued his work on adrenaline receptors, gradually shifting his focus from the heart to the brain's neurotransmitter receptors for adrenaline.

In 1983, age 37, a too-good-to-refuse offer came to Venter, to join the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; with funding of over a million dollars a year, he took most of his Buffalo team with him.

Venter began to consider the role of human genetic code - DNA - plays in the brain's adrenaline receptors. He and his team identified the entire gene sequence corresponding to the adrenaline receptor. This was a big achievement and a career-changing moment. Sequencing DNA now became his priority.

Venter then turned his attention to discovering the complete sequence of letters in the human genome – in other words, discovering the coding of all the genes in a molecule of human DNA. This was a task worthy of Hercules. Sensibly, he concentrated on devising strategies that could accelerate and simplify the discovery process.

Much of the human genome's complexity problem lay in the sheer quantity of useless ATCG base sequences in human DNA. For example, the section of the DNA molecule that determines your eye color - in other words, the gene for eye color - has many base sequences that do precisely nothing. This is called junk DNA.

These extra sequences dramatically increase the time and computer processing power needed to reassemble shotgun data. Just like a jigsaw, the more pieces there are, the longer it takes to assemble. Unlike a jigsaw, however, many of the DNA fragments add nothing useful to the overall picture.

Fortunately, human bodies are able to tell the difference between the useful and the useless base sequences using messenger RNA - people would be dead otherwise. Venter realized he could make good use of messenger RNA.

Messenger RNA (often written mRNA) is used to assemble proteins. It carries the instructions coded in genes in the DNA molecule to the cell’s protein factory.

Messenger RNA is actually a copy of the ACGT base sequences in a gene. It contains only the sequences needed to assemble proteins and none of the confusing junk sequences.

Venter used known techniques to convert the sequences in single-stranded messenger RNA back into double-stranded DNA. DNA made this way is called complementary or cDNA.

Reading the ATCG sequences in cDNA was a very slow task. But things looked up in 1987, when Caltech's Leroy Hood found a way of attaching different colored fluorescent dyes specifically to the A, C, G, or T base letters in DNA. He then used laser technology to read the sequence of letters. Venter took Hood's idea and had equipment built to automate the process of reading the letters, allowing computers to read the sequences.

Venter's next idea came to him on a flight back to America from a lecture tour of Japan. He knew he could make cDNA clones of small sections of DNA from different parts of the body. For example, a cDNA clone of messenger RNA found in the brain must contain a gene for some part of the brain’s function. He knew he could easily shotgun sequence such a cDNA clone to read its entire ATCG sequence quickly using his new automated sequencing technology.

Putting it all together, he realized he had the means of reading the sequences in genes at unprecedented speeds and quickly building a library of human genes. He called his new method EST, an acronym for Expressed Sequence Tags - another name for cDNA clones. With EST he could get results in weeks that would take other researchers many years to generate.

By the end of 1992, Venter's team at the National Institutes of Health had identified over 7,000 genes. The combined efforts of all the other researchers on the planet had identified about 2,000.

But Venter grew frustrated with internal political battles at the National Institutes of Health. In 1992, he resigned and took up a new position as head of the not-for-profit TIGR, The Institute of Genomic Research in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

TIGR was funded by Wallace Steinberg, a major-league venture capitalist. Steinberg wanted to keep American biotechnology ahead of other countries, and he also wanted to live forever: he saw decoding the human genome as a way of achieving both these goals.

The funding deal meant Venter would publish a gene’s sequence only after another of Steinberg’s companies had studied its usefulness in medical treatments for 6 months, or 12 months in the case of genes that looked promising enough to commercialize. Steinberg would get a further 18 months before Venter published if the gene looked like it could be overwhelmingly profitable.

Ironically, only three years after funding the project he hoped would find the key to eternal life, Steinberg died in 1995, age 61.

Venter now began an ambitious plan to build a gene library. He took tissues from human organs such as the brain, heart, and liver, then used his EST method to discover the genes responsible for building and operating these organs. Soon he was dealing with a flood of data.

He began thinking about the possibility of assembling his gene library into the complete human genome. He asked computer scientist Granger Sutton to start developing software that offered the hope of building the fragments in his gene library into a complete genome.

Venter enthused Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Hamilton Smith with his plans to sequence entire genomes. Smith suggested they aim for the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. By May 1995, Venter and his team announced in Science the first-ever complete genome sequence - all 1,830,137 base pairs - of a free-living organism. Science's front cover of July 28, 1995, featured a color-coded gene map of the genome. Venter's paper concluded: "...this strategy has potential to facilitate the sequencing of the human genome."

In 1998, Venter teamed up with Mike Hunkapiller of Perkin Elmer, who had designed and built the fastest sequencer yet available. Venter and Perkin Elmer formed Celera Genomics. Celera entered a race to sequence the human genome using Venter's EST method in combination with 300 of Perkin Elmer's sequencers. Their only competitor was the Human Genome Project (HGP), which had taxpayer funding of $3 billion and was expecting to complete its work in 2005. Celera’s funding was only about 10 percent of that, and they aimed to complete the project by 2000.

On June 26, 2000, Celera and their HGP competitors made a joint announcement from the White House. They had sequenced the human genome in the form of a "rough draft." Celera and the HGP published details in February 2001 and the final sequence mapping was completed in April 2003.

Venter's February 2001 paper in Science: The Sequence of the Human Genome, had 274 authors. This was biology on a scale that could hardly have been imagined by Gregor Mendel, whose solitary work with peas provided with the basic rules of heredity; or by Charles Darwin, squirreled away in his country home writing the Origin of Species; or even the scientists working in the 1950s to discover the structure of DNA - the three relevant papers had seven authors; Watson & Crick; Wilkins, Stokes & Wilson; and Franklin & Gosling.

In 2007, a team at the J. Craig Venter Institute led by Samuel Levy sequenced Venter’s genome. Venter shared information about his genome in his autobiography A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life. For example, his ability to swim long distances is determined by the lack of a mutation that causes the production of fatigue-causing enzyme.

In August 1996, Venter's team sequenced the genome of Methanococcus jannaschii, making a singular discovery. Over half the genes in this single-celled organism were previously unknown to science. Methanococcus thrives at thermal vents deep in the ocean. It is an example of the Archaea - a domain of life first recognized in 1977 by Carl Woese, adding to the two previously identified domains of Eukaryota and Bacteria.

Almost all of the planet's organisms are microbes. Even in the human body about ninety percent of the cells - trillions of them - are microbes. Less than two percent of the world's microbes can actually be grown for study in the laboratory. The rest are rather mysterious.

Venter's Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition regularly sailed the world's oceans between 2003-2010 gathering samples of microbes. Sequencing the DNA of these microbes revealed millions of new genes. Venter commented: "We have discovered over 95 percent of all the genes that have been discovered by science off the deck of [my] sailboat."

In 2010, Venter and his team synthesized a DNA molecule they had designed on a computer. The sequence of bases in the DNA was entirely chosen by Venter and his team. They introduced this DNA into a bacterial cell and allowed it to reproduce.

Synthetic DNA offers the possibility of creating new species of bacteria that work as micro-machines carrying out operations such as converting sunlight to electricity; or sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to oil.

Venter and his team demonstrated their ability to precisely code the DNA's 4-letter alphabet sequences by writing messages in the DNA for enthusiasts to decipher, such as a quote from Richard Feynman: "What I cannot build, I cannot understand."

Achievements

• John Craig Venter is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st century for his invaluable contributions in genomic research, most notably for the first sequencing and analysis of the human genome published in 2001 and the most recent and most complete sequencing of his diploid human genome in 2007.
  
  He is Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO, Co-Chief Scientific Officer of Synthetic Genomics, Inc; as well as Founder, President, and Chairman of the J. Craig Venter Institute. He was also the founder of Human Genome Sciences, Diversa Corporation, and Celera Genomics. He and his teams have sequenced more than 300 organisms including human, fruit fly, mouse, rat, and dog as well as numerous microorganisms and plants.
  
  Venter is also the key leader in the field of synthetic genomics. He is the author of more than 200 research articles and is among the most cited scientists in the world. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and scientific awards including the 2008 National Medal of Science. Venter is also a member of many prestigious scientific organizations including the National Academy of Sciences.
  
  He is the author of A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life

    (On May 20, 2010, headlines around the world announced one...)

    2013
  • A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life 2007

Religion

As is the case with most scientists, Venter is an atheist. When asked by "60 Minutes" interviewer Steve Kroft if he believed in God, Venter quickly replied: "No. I believe that the universe is far more wonderful than just assuming it was made by some higher power."

Regarding an afterlife, Venter has said: "We have one chance to live [life] and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you."

Politics

Politically, Venter is most concerned with getting his research either funded or past government regulators. And with this much more likely with a Democrat in the White House. So, he supports that party more than the Republicans.

However, even ex-President Obama launched a Bioethics commission investigation into Venter and his research after he synthetically created life and Venter did admit that it could be dangerous if taken into the wrong hands. In the end, the Obama administration and Venter have been working together to come up with an ethical framework for this type of science and Venter applauded the commission for its open-mindedness and wisdom.

Views

Venter has a habit of calling DNA the "software of life." And as the first scientist to actually create a living organism out of a computer-generated genetic design, it’s not surprising. He just considers himself a software writer.

Venter regularly cites the fact that there will be close to 9 billion people in the world in less than 50 years and that humanity is having trouble feeding the 7 billion currently here, saying: "We are a society that is 100% dependent on science. We're going to go up in our population in the next 40 years. We can't deal with the population we have without destroying our environment."

Much of his work involves genetically engineering algae to create a substance that can be refined into gasoline in hopes of addressing the energy crisis. He says: "I consider myself fundamentally more of an environmentalist than many of these environmental groups. We have to come up with new sources of food, new sources of water, new sources of energy. Trying to ignore leading-edge science and technology as a means of getting there is an ostrich approach of burying your head in the sand."

Quotations: "In 1990 fewer than two thousand human genes had been identified and sequenced, of which only 10 percent - such as the adrenaline receptor - came from the brain. Every day that our sequencing machine ran, we were able to discover twenty to sixty new human genes... We were going to turn biology upside down."

"Everyone talks about cooperative science, but I built the cooperative science with the best teams in the world, the mathematicians, the software engineers, the computer engineers, the sequencing machine engineers, cloud computing, machine learning, geneticists, biologists that are working together for the same common goal."

"One of the findings that would have shocked me and the rest of the world 15 years ago is that our genome is continually changing. We can relatively accurately predict your age from your genome sequence."

Membership

• 

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

Personality

With a reputation as an outspoken, blunt, abrasive character, Venter has made enemies as well as friends in both business and science. His enemies call him "Darth Venter" and reproach him as a publicity seeker. However, they cannot deny that his driven personality has allowed him to notch up a string of dramatic scientific successes.

Venter gravitates to physically challenging, sometimes dangerous hobbies. He could be described as an adrenaline junkie.

Interests

• Sailing, riding motorcycles, racing cars at high speed

• Sport & Clubs

  Swimming

Connections

John Craig Venter has been married three times. In 1968, he married Barbara Rae, a New Zealander. They had one son, Christopher, born in 1977. In 1980, Barbara left Venter.

In 1981, after an affair that set Buffalo faculty tongues wagging, Venter married Claire Fraser, one of his postgraduate students. They remained married for 24 years. Claire was a senior scientist in many of Venter's subsequent projects.

In 2008, Venter married his publicist Heather Kowalski.

Father:

John Eugene Venter

Mother:

Elizabeth Venter

Spouse:

Heather Kowalski

Brother:

Gary Gene Venter

Sister:

Suzzanna Patrice Venter Taylor

Brother:

Keith Henry Venter

ex-spouse:

Barbara Rae

ex-spouse:

Claire Fraser

Son:

Christopher Emrys Rea Venter

colleague:

Granger Sutton

In 1995, Venter began thinking about the possibility of assembling his gene library into the complete human genome. He asked Sutton to start developing software that offered the hope of building the fragments in his gene library into a complete genome.

colleague:

Mike Hunkapiller

In 1998, Venter teamed up with Mike Hunkapiller of Perkin Elmer, who had designed and built the fastest sequencer yet available. Venter and Perkin Elmer formed Celera Genomics.

References

• Craig Venter: Dissecting the Genome by Lisa Yount
  2011