J. Craig Venter, a scientist who played a critical role in the sequencing of the human genome, has died at the age of 79, according to his namesake research institute.
Venter's company, Celera Genomics, famously began a scientific race, trying to completely sequence the human genetic code before the government-funded Human Genome Project achieved the same feat. He pioneered new, cheaper, faster approaches such as the "whole genome shotgun method" that critics initially said wouldn't work.
In a 2003 interview with NPR, when Venter was asked about how he felt about being often called a scientific "maverick," he said that it "depends on how it's meant by most people, but in the context of stodgy science, I consider it a tremendous badge of honor."
Maverick or no, Venter's successes and provocations made him a scientific superstar. In 2000, when scientists gathered at the White House with President Bill Clinton to mark what was basically the completion of efforts to sequence all human genes, Venter was standing next to the president and celebrated for his rival sequencing effort.
Indeed, Venter left an indelible mark on his chosen field, according to Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University.
"Craig was not only an extraordinarily innovative scientist," Endy said. "He also willed important ideas forward into reality and practice. The more I understand how difficult it is to cause actually new things to happen the more I am in awe of what Craig was able to accomplish."
Venter attributed his interest in biology to his work as a young man serving in the U.S. Naval Medical Corps in Vietnam, where he said that he learned how tenuous life could be.
He later became the first person to sequence and publish his own individual genome. And his research team advanced the field of synthetic biology by creating a bacterial cell controlled by lab-synthesized DNA.
"The idea that you can engineer a living synthetic cell from scratch was just an idea until Craig came out and said, 'I will actually do it.' And then he actually did it," says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota.
The technique that labs use to build DNA these days was actually invented during the work by Venter's team on building a set of minimal genes needed for life, she says.
Venter will be remembered as "someone who takes up a problem — a big, seemingly impossible research program — and then just ignores everybody who says it's impossible and just goes and does it," says Adamala.
Mary-Claire King, a geneticist with the University of Washington in Seattle, says that during the race to sequence the human genome, Venter played a key role as a challenger to the Human Genome Project. His interest in patents, his work for a commercial company, and his showmanship got the public's attention — and lent urgency and weight to many researchers' calls for the human genetic sequence to be publicly available, and for it to belong to everyone.
"That was enormously important and Craig's being so over the top really basically provided the publicity that enabled the guys in the public sector project to make that point forcefully over and over again in a way that would be listened to," says King, who describes Venter as "a brilliant guy with a very strong sense of himself, enormous self-confidence."
The statement from the J. Craig Venter Institute that announced his death said that Venter had been hospitalized following unexpected side effects that arose during treatment for a recently diagnosed cancer.
At the White House event in 2000, he said that some had argued that sequencing the human genome would diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," Venter said. "The complexities and wonder of how the inanimate chemicals that are our genetic code give rise to the imponderables of the human spirit should keep poets and philosophers inspired for the millennium."
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