Craig Venter has died

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.

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!

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/

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.

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.

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!

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.

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."

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...

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.”).

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!

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

My his memory be a blessing.

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

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?)

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

A giant in biology. This is a real loss.

The bad boy of science!

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.

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