Genes for editing DNA were largely expendable. But it is unclear what the remaining genes do. The function of 79 genes is a complete mystery. One way to investigate their function is to engineer versions of the cell in which each of these genes can be turned on and off.
Venter is careful to avoid calling syn3. If he had done the same set of experiments with a different microbe, he points out, he would have ended up with a different set of genes. When scientists first began searching for such a thing 20 years ago, they hoped that simply comparing the genome sequences from a bunch of different species would reveal an essential core shared by all species.
But as the number of genome sequences blossomed, that essential core disappeared. They found that not a single gene is shared across all of life. For example, imagine a microbe that lives in the presence of a toxin, such as an antibiotic. A gene that can break down the toxin would be essential for a microbe in that environment.
But remove the toxin, and that gene is no longer essential. He and others are trying to make more basic life-forms that are representative of these earlier stages of evolution.
He was deflected from that path by a class with Gordon Sato and a project with Nate Kaplan. Venter breezed through his undergraduate and graduate schooling in six years, worked at the State University of New York, Buffalo , and was recruited to the National Institutes of Health in In the early s, Venter developed the EST method of finding genes, and promoted it as cheaper and faster than the Human Genome Project that was just getting started.
Project administrators disagreed, but in the meantime, the NIH decided to patent Venter's gene fragments. The Patent Office eventually rejected the patents, but the applications sparked an international controversy over patenting genes whose functions were still unknown.
Again, he came up with a quicker and faster method: whole genome shotgun sequencing. He applied for an NIH grant to use the method on Hemophilus influenzae , but started the project before the funding decision was returned. When the genome was nearly complete, NIH rejected his proposal saying the method would not work. As he turned his focus to the human genome, Venter left TIGR and started the for-profit company Celera , a division of Applied Biosystems , the company that makes the latest and greatest sequencing machines.
Using these machines, and the world's largest civilian supercomputer, Venter finished assembling the human genome in just three years. Funded by The Josiah Macy, Jr. All rights reserved. Concept 39 A genome is an entire set of genes. He has created synthetic life and started three companies, and was almost a billionaire before being fired from one of the most promising, Celera Genomics. Now he's back with his most ambitious project since his historic breakthrough 17 years ago.
It's certainly very thorough--and, to many doctors, precisely the wrong approach, owing to all the false positives. I don't think it's good medicine. Venter scoffs. We use a definition of health out of the Middle Ages: If you look okay and you feel okay, you're deemed healthy. We have a different way of looking at people. Now 70, Venter cites himself. Last year, he underwent his own physical and says he found prostate cancer, which was removed last November.
The man he has called his "scientific muse," Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, 85, found he had a deadly lymphoma in his lung. It has also been treated, and Smith says his prognosis is good. The famously gruff Venter is entirely comfortable ticking off the establishment, no matter what that establishment is, and the feeling is mutual. His DNA breakthrough was one of the great scientific accomplishments of the 20th century, yet he never won a Nobel Prize.
Academics view him as someone interested in profits over science. Similarly, Venter's discoveries have upended industries, yet his business track record, including a brief flirtation with billionairehood, is checkered, as connections to past backers and bosses have gone up in flames.
Venter tending to patients in Vietnam as a Navy corpsman. Growing up in Millbrae, California, near what was emerging as Silicon Valley, he had such bad grades that by high school his worried mother sometimes checked his arms for track marks. The first glimmer of his future success was in swimming. He was initially mediocre, but when a coach sent him home for the summer with tips, his competitive streak kicked in.
He spent three months training furiously and never again lost a race. Swimming unlocked his potential, but Vietnam made him who he is. At age 20 he served as a Navy hospital corpsman, triaging troops who came back from battle, including the Tet Offensive.
Deciding who would live and who would die was so traumatic that he says he considered suicide and swam far out to sea intending to drown. He says he had a change of heart a mile out after a shark prodded him. But he'd go through Vietnam again. After he returned to the States, he went to community college, then the University of California, San Diego, where he initially wanted to be a doctor but discovered science.
He eventually completed his Ph. At the NIH the themes that would define his career locked into place: productivity, perceived greed, the conflicts between pure science and industry money. Using a new technology, he discovered thousands of human genes. The NIH made the unprecedented decision to patent them in his name, and colleagues blamed Venter, calling him greedy.
Nobel laureate James Watson said he was "horrified. Frustrated, he started a nonprofit institute in , with a unique model. He raised money from venture capitalists, on the condition that he share his data with a for-profit company, Human Genome Sciences, before he published it. But in , Venter's institute made a real breakthrough: the first genome, or map of the genetic code of an organism, in this case a type of bacterium. It was a suggestion from Ham Smith. They had met at a scientific conference in Spain in and gone out drinking, starting a two-decade-plus collaboration.
Foreshadowing his later race with the Human Genome Project, Venter and Smith's bacterial genome map beat similar projects in academia by many months. If he could sequence a bacterial genome, why not use the company's newest machines to sequence a human genome?
Beagle helped lay the groundwork for his theory of In , J. Craig Venter set off on his own circumnavigation of the globe aboard his foot sailboat, Sorcerer II, to identify millions of previously undiscovered genes. Map: Jack Molloy for Forbes. Venter couldn't say no, which led to Celera Genomics' founding in
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