Craig Venter

Craig Venter raced the public Human Genome Project to a draft sequence and then built the first cell with a synthetic genome. He was a Vietnam medic who came to science late, and at the National Institutes of Health he pioneered expressed sequence tags, a shortcut to finding genes that also produced an early fight about whether gene fragments could be patented. In 1998 he founded Celera Genomics and announced he would sequence the human genome in three years for a tenth of the public consortium's budget, using whole-genome shotgun sequencing - breaking the genome into random fragments and reassembling it computationally, which most of the field thought would not work at that scale. It did. The rivalry was bitter and ended in a brokered joint announcement at the White House in June 2000, with both drafts published in different journals the following February. A large part of the Celera sequence was his own DNA. He later sailed the Sorcerer II around the world sampling seawater and multiplied the number of known genes several times over, and in 2010 his institute assembled a bacterial genome from chemicals and booted it in an emptied cell, with watermarks written into the sequence. He has argued consistently that biology is an information science, which was contentious and is now assumed. The Nobel has not gone to him, which is a standing subject of comment. His sequencing of his own genome made him one of the first people to know his own risk profile, and he published it. The synthetic cell of 2010 was followed in 2016 by a minimal one with 473 genes, about a third of whose function nobody could explain - which he presented as the interesting result rather than an embarrassment.

• Lived: 1946 CE – ?
• Nationality: American
• Roles: scientist