20/20 Human Genome Pioneer Continues to Push the Envelope
by Chris Anderson, Senior Editor
Venter admits he is an impatient man. And it
was likely this impatience that led him, while
heading The Institute for Genomic Research
(TIGR), to feud with NIH officials reluctant to
embrace his ideas on how to pursue sequencing
the human genome. Convinced the clone-by-
clone method employed by government
scientists as part of the Human Genome Project
(HGP) was too plodding and with TIGR left off
the list of groups selected to contribute to HGP,
he left the effort in 1998 for Celera Genomics.
Flush with a couple of hundred million dollars
raised from private investors, Venter built an
operation at Celera that ran around the clock
using shotgun sequencing and, in the process,
fired the starting pistol of a public-private race
to complete sequencing the first human genome.
In forging his own path and insisting the
shotgun approach would yield results
significantly faster, Venter was on the butt
end of some blunt and often brutal criticism,
including from the man directing the
multi-national HGP and current Director of
NIH, Francis Collins, who infamously said that
Celera’s approach would produce the “Mad
Magazine version of the genome.” Yet less than
two years later, in June 2000, there was Venter
in the White House with President Clinton and
Collins, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair
via satellite, as a central figure in announcing
the first draft of the human genome.
At times awkward and at others conciliatory,
the White House event was notable in that
Clinton’s opening remarks only made an oblique
reference to the rivalry. But when tossed to 10
Downing Street in London, Blair said almost
immediately “I would like to mention the
imaginative work of Celera and Dr. Craig Venter
who, in the best spirit of scientific competition,
has helped accelerate today’s achievement.”
It’s a long way from Venter’s beginnings to
being praised by world leaders. It’s also unlikely
his grade school and high school teachers
would have pegged a young Craig Venter as
a scientific pioneer. “I avoided school and
didn’t do well because I was not good at rote
memorization. I found it really boring,” he
told the Journal of Precision Medicine recently.
And he admits he drove his parents to distraction
as a 7th grader when he flat out refused to take
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We talk to a visionary about their career path in science, how it has shaped their current perspective in this evolving field and ask for some predictions for the future of Precision Medicine.
Say what you will about J. Craig Venter – and opinions run the gamut from him being our generation’s greatest scientist to him also being its greatest egomaniac – but he gets things done. His CV is dotted with accomplishments any one of which most people would be happy to call their crowning career achievement: sequencing the first genome, the first draft of the human genome, the first complete human genome and creating the first synthetic organism.
spelling tests at school. “I thought it was just
stupid to memorize words in order to regurgitate
them later on a spelling test.” Yet he still sees
those early school experiences as one of the
reasons for his success as a scientist, noting that
he “didn’t have the curiosity beaten out of me
by the system. I maintained my raw curiosity
because I was out on my own exploring things.”
After turning down a college swimming
scholarship and dabbling with the idea of
becoming a professional surfer, Venter, like
so many of his generation, was drafted in 1965
and soon found himself stationed at the
military hospital in Da Nang, Vietnam. “That
was a huge positive influence on my life,
because I ended up in the medical corps and
helping to deal with a lot more medicine and
trauma than most physicians do in their lives,”
Image courtesy of Reuters
When speaking about the future of Human
Longevity, despite the slow progress since
the release of the first human genome, one
gets the sense that Venter feels we are at a
tipping point. “When our first human
genome took a hundred million dollars and
you get just one, well that’s not a scalable
operation. Now, each of the machines we
have at Human Longevity is the equivalent
of 13,050 complete Celera genome operations,”
he pointed out. “We have 24 of these machines
and we will be adding on. So it is 24 times
13,050 – that is our increase over what we
could do 15 years ago at Celera.”
Venter on……luring Franz Och from Google to work at Human Longevity“He led the effort to build Google Translate and has now gotten it so they can translate 90 languages all into each other just using machine learning and other tools. I convinced him that translating the human genome code is the biggest translation challenge in history.”
…de-identified genomic data“It is a bogus notion that you de-identify the human genome sequence. That is why there won’t be public databases of genomes unless there is a huge population of people that are happy to have their genomes and medical records laid bare in the public domain.”
…the founding of Celera Genomics“I was clearly at the right place at the right time with the right irreverent attitude to take on racing the entire federal government science system, to the biggest prize in modern science and biology.”
…serving in the medical corps in Vietnam“I learned that for treating people and saving lives, knowledge is power. The more I had, the more lives I could save, the more effective I could be at my job. It’s a shame more people don’t learn those lessons earlier in their lives.”
…the Human Genome Project Findings“The biggest news when we published the first human genome 15 years ago was the small number of human genes. Most people in science wanted there to be a very large number, so there was one gene for each human trait. They wanted this nice linear world, versus the complex nature of biology.”
genes whose functions are unknown.
~There are some genes where all that
is known is that without them you
cannot get life-even in bacteria with very
small genomes . “I think that is an important
message about biology overall,” Venter said. “If
that is true for a tiny genome of a small bacte-
rial cell, when we hear people talk as though
they know what the function of genes are in
the human genome, hopefully people take that
with a grain of salt.”
Late last year, Venter, now 68, handed over
leadership of Synthetic Genomics to ex-Cubist
Pharmaceuticals executive Oliver Fetzer
to focus on his newest company, Human
Longevity Inc. With the heady goal of solving
“the diseases of aging by changing the way
he said. Upon returning to California, he
enrolled in a community college and later at
the University of California, San Diego with
the intention of becoming a physician. While
there, he met Nathan Kaplan, one of the early
pioneers in molecular biology and soon after
Venter switched paths to the study of basic
science. The switch came as a result of his
first published scientific paper “Biologically
Active Catecholamines Covalently Bound to
Glass Beads” as a junior in 1972. “Making a
breakthrough in science is probably one of the
most gratifying things a person can do and it
became very addictive very quickly,” he said.
If scientific breakthroughs are relatively rare,
Venter can feed his inner adrenaline junky with
any number of the sports cars or motorcycles,
both old and new, he is fond of collecting. On
the day of his interview with the JOPM he had
driven a Tesla to work because “I try to balance
my high octane habits with some environmental
sensitivity.”
More than just a hobby, running his cars at
6,000 RPMs allows him to quiet his equally
revved mind, as it constantly searches for new
scientific innovations. “When you are driving
a race car down the track at 150 miles per hour,
you don’t have time to think about other
things,” he pointed out. “And I think one of
the successes that I’ve had, with constant
innovation and new ideas, is breaking the cycle
of focusing on those things all the time with
other activities that require 100 percent intense
concentration.”
These days, Venter is involved with a handful of
companies and organizations looking to build
on his genomic work, including the J. Craig
Venter Institute (JCVI), founded in 2006, and
Synthetic Genomics, which he started with
fellow JCVI scientist Hamilton Smith. It was
at Synthetic Genomics that Venter and his
research team made yet another breakthrough
in 2010 – the creation of the first living organism
designed by man using synthetic DNA.
Since that time, researchers have attempted to
design a new species in silico, based on first
principals, and then build it and get it to live.
Those efforts have not borne fruit, mostly due
to the fact that there are still a vast number of
medicine is practiced,” the company’s mission
reflects Venter’s penchant for thinking big. In
order to accomplish this, the company will
look to integrate the strength of new technologies
in sequencing and informatics, with advances
es in genomics and stem cell research. HLI
plans to feed this research platform by
building the world’s largest genotype
and phenotype database, aiming to
have one million complete human
genomes by the end of the decade.
“Our goal is to build this large data
base very quickly at a scale that
is beyond what anybody else
is even considering and
applying these new
computing approaches,”
Venter said.
Illustration by Gabriel Moreno