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.
Go to: Francis Collins Why would so many believe it's morally wrong? Higher cells incorporate an ancient chromosome. Some DNA does not encode protein. Some DNA can jump.
Genes can be turned on and off. He is founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute and J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, not-for-profit research and support organizations dedicated to human genomic research, exploration of social and ethical issues in genomics, and alternative energy solutions through microbial sources.
Venter began his formal education after serving as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam from to In , he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he developed expressed-sequence tags ESTs , a revolutionary strategy for gene discovery. In , he founded TIGR, where he and his team decoded the genome of the first free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae , using an original whole-genome shotgun technique. Venter's techniques. In , Dr. 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 In the process, Venter angered scientists globally, aghast that such research would be driven by profit rather than knowledge.
At the time, James Watson reportedly became so enraged he compared Venter to Hitler, asking colleagues who they were going to be--Chamberlain or Churchill?
But the pressure of private enterprise ultimately spurred results, both at Celera and the public group, which improved their methods and accelerated their research. As a result, the two groups jointly announced they had mapped the entire human genome--an achievement that our grandkids will be reading about in their textbooks--at the White House on June 26, It was a necessary scientific nest egg.
Celera struggled to invent drugs and diagnostic tests based on its pioneering research, and Venter bickered constantly with the board. They wanted Celera to become a pharma giant and invent medicines in-house. Venter simply wanted to be a scientist and sell other companies his data. He was fired in January , days before a quarter of his stock options would vest.
Venter's baby had essentially been sold for parts. Venter and his poodle, Darwin. Those two groups produced an "average" DNA sequence. That's incredibly important for a science textbook, but for individuals, it's the differences--how one person's genes are different from another's, leading to different noses, eye colors and, yes, diseases--that matter. Venter says that, thanks to new technology, he can generate the data that can determine those differences.
Illumina, the San Diego firm that makes the desktop sequencers, is a big investor in Human Longevity. Human Longevity initially sequenced DNA from 40, people who had participated in clinical trials for the pharmaceutical companies Roche and AstraZeneca.
Venter says this work has led to the discovery of genetic variations that can be found in young people but not older ones--meaning the young folks had genes incompatible with surviving into old age. Figuring out what these genes do could be the kind of breakthrough that would turn the promise of genome sequencing into a lifesaver.
Venter decided that he also needed a study of people that could collect even more data than you can get from a clinical trial. And because people pay, it's not only a source of data but also a revenue generator. At the moment, close to people have gone through the physical. This isn't exactly covered by Medicare. The market, for the moment, will be the wealthy and the occasional company looking out for key executives--the promise of health as the ultimate luxury item.
Doctors hate it. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said Venter's work sounded like "fascinating science," so long as the people taking the physical understand that this is research, not medicine. Venter believes the problem with earlier screening tests is that they give too little data, not too much. He is his own evidence. He was the first person to get his DNA sequenced, and the results made him think his risk for most types of cancer was low.
When he got prostate cancer, he asked his researchers why. They found what he calls "the likely perpetrator. It's a change in the way his body responds to the hormone testosterone. Testosterone works by tripping a cellular receptor think of it as a switch.
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