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.
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".
At just 60 ~ 90 years, a rut of a single decade can take up > 15% of your lifespan.
I learned a lot about Craig Venter after reading My Life Decoded in college. Truly an amazing person.
Average life expectancy for males in the US is 76.5 years. During the pandemic it dipped below 74. So he was definitely already on the lucky side of the distribution. He also famously once said: "If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life."
It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.
Anyway, this conversation has been had repeatedly. Many people seem to be unable to imagine that positive benefit of much longer lives.
Suppose that’s why “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do.
It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.
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!
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/
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...
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.
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.
[1] https://undark.org/2024/07/09/informed-consent-human-genome-...
But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it).
> After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1]
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/04/223919/craig-ven...
> Linnaeus is designated as the type specimen for the human species, Homo sapiens.
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.
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/
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!
"
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...
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.
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.
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.”).
My his memory be a blessing.
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?)
