J. Craig Venter, the scientist whose privately funded race to decode the human genetic blueprint upended the field of genomics, died April 29 in San Diego, his research institute announced. He was 79.
Venter had been hospitalized for side effects from a recent cancer treatment, the J. Craig Venter Institute said.
His work at Celera Genomics in the 1990s and early 2000s accelerated the reading of the human genome by years, igniting a revolution in biology that continues to unfold. In the 1990s Venter wagered that a different sequencing technique could speed up the process and beat an enormous government effort called the Human Genome Project. In 2000, Celera Genomics and leaders of the Human Genome Project jointly announced they had decoded the 3.1 billion chemical “letters” of DNA, the recipe of human life.
“Some have said to me that sequencing the human genome will diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life,” Venter said at a White House event that year. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
A draft was declared complete by the project in April 2003. Venter’s effort revealed deeper mysteries even as it opened a window onto the genetic roots of rare diseases and common conditions such as heart disease and cancer, and highlighted mutations that may elevate disease risk.
Born in 1947, Venter served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, an experience he said taught him how fragile life could be and made him curious about how trillions of cells in the human body conspire to create and maintain life. He later worked at the National Institutes of Health, where he helped develop a technique to rapidly identify large segments of human genes.
Venter was the first person to publish his own fully sequenced genome, hoping researchers could scan it to learn what was inherited from each parent and where vulnerabilities to disease might lie — a step toward tailoring future treatments to a person’s genes. In synthetic biology, his team created a bacterial cell with laboratory-synthesized DNA, a milestone that suggested it might one day be possible to build living organisms from scratch.