Craig Venter has died

https://www.jcvi.org/media-center/j-craig-venter-genomics-pioneer-and-founder-jcvi-and-diploid-genomics-inc-dies-79

by rdl • 3 months ago

342 85 3 months ago

rdl• 3 months ago

He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.

dnautics3• 3 months ago

iiuc it was hamilton smith who insisted that shotgun sequencing would work. the nih side insisted on primer walking until celera started assembling the genome so rapidly that the nih had to get in on shotgun too

acmj3• 3 months ago

No, at initial release, the human genome from the NIH side was done by bac-to-bac, not by shotgun.

elmolino892• 3 months ago

I belive you are mixing assembling the genome by combining sequences of individual, overlapping inserts of cosmids, fosmids, PACs and BACs (bacterial vectors with human DNA inserts of 40-150kbp) to whole genome shotgun. The inserts of the above bacterial vectors were sequenced using shotgun, but the gaps in the sequence were closed with custom primers.

echelon• 3 months ago

in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it).

I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.

dnautics3• 3 months ago

i worked for ham smith and my understanding through him is that both sides relied on data that the other produced.

here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/

apitman• 3 months ago

Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.

dnautics3• 3 months ago

i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him

jltsiren• 3 months ago

Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly.

The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.

moralestapia• 3 months ago

Yes, his was the first complete genome ever sequenced (by a private entity).

acmj3• 3 months ago

You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample.

epistasis2• 3 months ago

"Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable.

So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:

https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com...

codeulike• 3 months ago

It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up.

Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem.

So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing

peterfirefly• 3 months ago

Involved in the sense that his method worked and the one the Human Genome Project insisted on didn't. In the end, they had to use his method to catch up enough that everybody could pretend they did it together and collaboratively -- even though Venter clearly got there first. Venter deserved a Nobel Prize for that and, quite frankly, the Human Genome Project guys deserved a firing.

rwmj• 3 months ago

He was known informally as the Venterpillar.

alex11382• 3 months ago

Sad news. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk was interesting back in the day

koeng• 3 months ago

I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.

dyauspitr• 3 months ago

Oh no! I did an internship at his lab when I went to UCSD. RIP.

kingsleyopara• 3 months ago

I went to a talk of his once and discovered that I also have aphantasia. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy the little I interacted with him. RIP

busterarm• 3 months ago

I just read your comment and also just discovered that I have aphantasia.

Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.

jfengel• 3 months ago

That's unexpected. He was only 80, and as I understand it still working.

My his memory be a blessing.

jwilliams• 3 months ago

Sad news. I met Craig very briefly at a conference probably a decade back. I pretty much was a self-study in genetics at the time... so let's just say I wasn't in Craig's league. Despite this he was very engaged and took the time for a very thoughtful chat.

timcobb• 3 months ago

RIP Craig Venter.

I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there.

Thank you Craig Venter!

gwerbret• 3 months ago

Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2].

1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity

2: https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/

melling2• 3 months ago

It appears he had cancer and something about the treatment caused his death.

Aeroi2• 3 months ago

I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.

He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.

He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.

unsupp0rted8• 3 months ago

Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.

cowsandmilk• 3 months ago

Only 79… far from a complete human experience

It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.

brettgriffin• 3 months ago

This is just a tragic way to view the world, on so may levels: 79 is a great run for anybody. And more importantly, Craig Venter did more in 79 years than most people could do in two or three lifetimes. Lastly, of course, life is literally the longest thing you will ever experience, regardless of how long it lasts.

I learned a lot about Craig Venter after reading My Life Decoded in college. Truly an amazing person.

MyHonestOpinon• 3 months ago

Looking at his life. This is as complete human experience as we can hope to get.

CWuestefeld• 3 months ago

I'd MUCH rather consider the completeness of my experience based on what I was able to experience, rather than how long I'd lived for.

Sorry for the tangent, but this is a pet peeve of mine. From my perspective, it seems like our modern quest for safety in all things has the effect of wrapping the whole world, and ourselves, in bubble wrap. The goal seems to be to extend that number as far as possible, without regard to how the life that we experience during that period is diminished by all the safeguards.

It bothers me that we've made it a mantra, telling each other "have a safe trip", or "be safe", and so on. I can't remember anyone saying "have the richest experience you can manage".

kjs34• 3 months ago

What is sad is having a world view where the value of a human life is duration, not accomplishment.

subtextminer• 3 months ago

You can definitely say that ego was the fountainhead of progress for him!

TuringNYC• 3 months ago

RIP. I absolutely loved the book A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter.

Imnimo• 3 months ago

The bad boy of science!

LarsDu88• 3 months ago

When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair).

Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald.

A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time..

A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work.

Basically Venter and his accomplishments have been the background to my entire adult career in biology, genetics, bioinformatics and machine learning.

RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!

Aeroi2• 3 months ago

Great stories. I asked him about the pig thing, after he pivoted from biofuels (I think they raised $150m from Exxon). If I recall he teamed up with another infamous founder Martin, now Martine, Rothblatt who created SeriusXM and United Therapeutics.

PeterStuer• 3 months ago

Great scientist, but Celera was the worst financial investment I ever made.

sqlcook• 3 months ago

Sad news, I’ve worked at HumanLongevity and got to interact with Craig several times. He was a legend and truly will be missed.

E-Reverance• 3 months ago

Interesting comment from him:

SPIEGEL: So you don't consider Collins to be a true scientist?

Venter: Let's just say he's a government administrator.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/craig-venter-venti...

__loam• 3 months ago

A giant in biology. This is a real loss.

randogp• 3 months ago

At the time they announced the full genome sequence I was an intern in molecular biology. We had a thermocycler in the lab and I had to book my slot on a paper agenda. I remember this portrait of him in front of multiple racks each plenty of thermocyclers. He taught me something about scale and he proved that sometimes it's worth looking at what you have and ask what if I could 200x this. In software this might seem obvious with GPU arrays etc.. but when you are trained in a wet lab and the instrument paper agenda, I wonder if we could have more breakthroughs in life sciences if we could use some bruteforce now and then. RIP

CrazyStat• 3 months ago

I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big sample sizes should be, and trying to use radically larger samples runs into all sorts of barriers ranging from ethics concerns (for animal experiments) to funding.

At the end of the day there's only so much you can learn from a sample size of 12. I'm not sure it's more ethical to have a bunch of wasted experiments with 12 mice each where you don't learn anything than to use 100 mice and actually have statistical power to identify something other than the hugest effect sizes.

elmolino892• 3 months ago

Lack of appropriate funding leads to cutting corners to the point that some results may not be worth the price of the paper to describe them. I had a passing experience with epigenetics. Even experiments with basically free of ethics issues cell lines could be screwed up by using single end, too short sequencing reads. Combined with too low coverage, less than perfect controls it gives the input data I which the state of the art peak callers will just throw the towel. So the "trick" is to use some way more forgiving peak caller and get a rather crappy results. Using the outdated human genome assembly (hg19), and old genome mapping programs just puts an extra cherry on the cake...

waiquoo• 3 months ago

I'm in lab automation, we've come a long way from paper schedules (although those still get plenty of use :) )

gadders• 3 months ago

Just read this review of his autobiography: https://www.atlassociety.org/post/what-shall-we-do-with-a-bu...

He seems like a complicated character, but like the article says “Quod licit Jovis, non licit bovis” (“What is permitted Jove is not permitted a cow.”).

shevy-java• 3 months ago

This is (specifically) unfortunate - let me explain why.

Some comments are critical of Craig; this may be understandable as he always liked having media focus on either his personality or on what he is/was doing.

Craig was, in my opinion, mostly a business person first, scientist second, but I think he was also genuinely fascinated and interested in science. Others already brought the example of the human genome project (HGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project, although I remember it as HUGO - strange how Wikipedia uses another name for this. I can't say for certain whether my memory fails me, or Wikipedia seems to "forget". Anyway.).

People also stated how the scientists back then got scared by Craig, aka "he will finish before we do, we are too slow", or "he will patent the ESTs and sell it, we must hurry up" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag). This was in the 1990s primarily, late 1990s. Now - I leave everyone to their thoughts here, but in my opinion, Craig kind of was like a destabilizer in a positive manner, in that he got scientists to focus more. Kind of like a shocker system in a defibrillator. A defibrillator isn't extremely enjoyable, but the use case is to try to get a halted heart to pulse again (in the ideal outcome). In some ways I think Craig kind of was like that for the larger scientific community. He became famous during the human genome research, even if media attention was also driven here, and lateron in synthetic biology (first synthetic cell) and some more. One can easily say that everything would have been done or discovered without Craig, that's fine, but in many ways he kind of also acted as an accelerator here. Today research-to-product is really quite rapid; in the 1990s my memory kind of says that we all were slower back then. And while those changes may all have come without Craig too, I think he kind of pushed others towards more effective speed too - perhaps not always positive, but in some cases I think Craig was acting as an accelerator. Which I think is not a net-negative per se. (Also, as for patenting information such as DNA - I am of course, as any logical person, absolutely against that, but the problem here is not Craig, the problem is that the USA has a completely broken patent system. For instance you can patent something but then forbid others from using it AND you yourself also don't use it. I fail to see how this benefits anyone, other than market control and market competition. That should be different. Many more things too, but this is not about the patent situation; it is about critisizing Craig for patents. Numerous others benefit from the patent situation, so why are these not critisized too?)

kjs34• 3 months ago

* I can't say for certain whether my memory fails me, or Wikipedia seems to "forget". *

Sure it does. Some 'editor' decides the article violates some arcane 'rule', or doesn't like the content for some reason, or doesn't like you for some reason, and poof.

dekhn2• 3 months ago

The way I describe it is that his actions (even before the human genome) clearly showed that the individual-driven, "artisinal" sequencing was far less productive.

When I started in computational biology (1994) the E.Coli genome was not even done, and there was one lab doing the work, very slowly. You'd FTP to some server every week or so and download a few more kilobytes. It really felt like slow science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_science). Venter helped convince people (Lander was another) that sequencing was an industrial process that could be accelerated significantly.

Tommix11• 3 months ago

I attended a lecture of his once. One of the topics was emailing biological viruses. Svante Pääbo was there too.

lofaszvanitt• 3 months ago

One of the few people who could give a TED Talk that wasn't complete BS. It actually had substance and some thought-provoking ideas.

t0mpr1c3• 3 months ago

A world-class (and possibly universe-class) egotist who published the first diploid human genome sequence. It was his own DNA. He did not stop at broadcasting his achievement to a human audience: "Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth."

kridsdale3• 3 months ago

I can't think of a better manifestation of the biological male imperitive.

crispyambulance• 3 months ago

RIP. He was an amazing human. I worked for a time at JCVI when it was in Rockville, shortly after he had left Celera Genomics. He led a team that did something which was considered intractably difficult-- sequencing whole genomes. Then he did it again with global ocean sampling and synthetic genomics and other things. That is not to say that "he did it single-handedly", Venter was a hybrid of scientific and organizational talent that was able to make this stuff happen by coordinating stuff that's super hard to coordinate.

adi4213• 3 months ago

Woah - I just drove by the JCV institute in La Jolla yesterday and felt thinking that the organization was really monumental to synthetic biology. Rest in peace

karp773• 3 months ago

I read his autobiography. Besides the genome work, which undoutedly was of historical importance, one thing that impressed me the most, was how he slept on the surgery table in the opersting room after cleaning blood from it in Vietnam. Somehow it was safer than in the barracks. I was like wow, this guy definitely knew how to think outside the box!

Craig Venter has died

Related Stories