J. Craig Venter, the renegade scientist who tried to beat the publicly-funded Human Genome Project with a private company — and nearly succeeded — died last week at 79.
My guest this week, Jamie Shreeve, shadowed Venter for two years as part of his research for The Genome War, a book about the saga that captured not only the best and the worst aspects of Venter, but of human nature itself.
Shreeve and I evaluated Venter’s legacy while also reminiscing about the man who will be remembered both as a good friend and as an “asshole” in equal measure. In the course of our conversation, we paid homage to Venter’s longtime colleague and Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, who died in October at 94. Shreeve is also revealing, for the first time, a James Watson take on Venter so brutal that he left it out of the book.
If you have your own memories of Venter or a thought on how he should be remembered, please share.
Earlier this week, I attended the SynBioBeta conference in the Bay Area, an annual showcase for synthetic biology. In addition to his work on analyzing the genomes of existing organisms, Venter was a pioneer in making new ones. The conference organizers honored him with a 20-foot-tall poster and invited attendees to share their memories of him. Numerous Post-It notes shared how Venter had directly helped a fledgling career or indirectly inspired one.
I never met Venter, so my conception of him has always been and will forever be based on Shreeve’s portrait of him. The Genome War is one of my all-time favorite books and provides an even fuller picture of who Venter was. Please consider buying a copy through your local bookstore:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-genome-war-how-craig-venter-tried-to-capture-the-code-of-life-and-save-the-world-james-shreeve/e018f9700a01fcd0?ean=9780345433749&next=t
Shreeve is also the author of The Neandertal Enigma and co-author of Lucy’s Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor.
You can also listen to the interview on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
A note: In the interview I compare sequencing-by-synthesis, the dominant method for analyzing whole human genomes today, to the shotgun sequencing method used by Venter at Celera. As I was informed by Adam Phillippy, a leading computational biologist, this analogy isn’t entirely correct when it comes to the data analysis step.
“Performing de novo genome assembly, as was required for the first genome project, is nearly impossible from short (~100 basepair) reads,” he said in an email. “During the entire short-read era, people were mapping reads to the human reference, rather than re-assembling the genome each time.”
Still, Venter’s work helped push the field towards assembling a reference genome, which was essential for SBS. “This method of analysis was only possible because a reference sequence already existed,” Phillippy said. “Early SBS would have been nearly worthless without a reference sequence.”
