Craig Venter obituary | Science

At the international BioVision conference in Lyon in February 2001, geneticist Craig Venter made a remarkable scientific breakthrough. Human beings have far fewer genes than science had ever imagined, he announced. We have about 30,000, which is much lower than previous estimates of 100,000.

Such a lack of hereditary material shows that people are not prisoners of their genes but are mainly shaped by environmental influences, he added. “We just don’t have enough genes for this idea of ​​biological determinism to be right,” said Venter, who died at the age of 79. “The marvelous diversity of the human species is not written into our genetic code. Our environments are essential.”

The timing of Venter’s announcement was dramatic. A few days later, the journals Nature and Science were to publish details of the first draft of the human genome and describe in detail the genetic makeup of our species – which would, in effect, reveal the rarity of our genes. This work had been carried out by the US government and the Sanger Center of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, in an uneasy partnership with Venter’s private sequencing company, Celera Genomics.

BioVision 2001 was created to orchestrate the publication of the results of the partnership, but during the closing sessions of the conference a few days later. Venter had now thrown a spanner in the works of this carefully organized process. The journalists in the audience, myself included, were surprised. Besides revealing our unexpectedly low number of genes (the figure has since been reduced further, to around 20,000), Venter had completely undermined the impact his rivals were intended to have.

“Did you know that these results are under embargo until next week? I asked Venter. “It might have been their embargo, but it wasn’t mine,” he replied. His announcement made headlines in newspapers around the world, including my own at the time, the Observer.

Venter was a brilliant, daring entrepreneur and unabashed self-promoter who took pleasure in showing off his accomplishments as well as his private planes, yachts and flash watches. It was a trend that made them enemies. James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, from which our genes are made, compared him to Hitler for trying to dominate science by trying to patent human genes. Others nicknamed him “Dark” Venter, in homage to the Star Wars villain.

Other scientists have been more lenient. Neuroscientist Sir John Hardy of University College London (UCL), who collaborated with Venter on dementia research, acknowledged that competition between Celera researchers and scientists from the US and UK governments was sometimes driven by testosterone. “On the other hand, there is no doubt that this competition accelerated things enormously and ended in a draw,” Hardy said.

Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Elisabeth (née Wisdom) and John Venter, both parents who served in the United States Marines during World War II; At that time, his father was studying accounting and his mother was selling real estate to help the family finances. Growing up in Millbrae, California, he had a poor academic record at Mills High School. He was offered a swimming scholarship to Arizona State University, but turned it down and chose the beaches of Southern California to pursue “activities involving drinking, girls, and bodysurfing,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Life Decoded, published in 2007. Those pleasures were interrupted by the Vietnam War. Venter enrolled in Naval Hospital Corps School and became a senior corpsman in Da Nang in the Naval Hospital Intensive Care Unit, a job he later described as M*A*S*H without the jokes and pretty women.

“I saw several hundred soldiers die, most often while I was massaging their hearts – sometimes with my bare hands – or trying to breathe life into them,” he recalls. “Vietnam would teach me more than I ever wanted to know about the fragility of life. »

The war had a beneficial impact on Venter. This stimulated his interest in the life sciences, and he applied to study medicine at the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology in 1975, seven years after returning from Vietnam.

He began research in genome sequencing and in 1992 co-founded the Genomics Research Institute (later the J Craig Venter Institute) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, with biologist Claire Fraser, who later became his second wife. In 1995, their team generated the first genomic sequence of a living organism, bacteria. Haemophilus influenzaeusing a revolutionary technique he called whole-genome shotgun sequencing. Random pieces of DNA are sequenced and then assembled into contiguous genomic sequences using powerful computers. In 1998, Venter founded Celera Genomics to apply this method to the human genome.

Crucially, Venter’s technique contrasted with that used by publicly funded British and American scientists, who sequenced the genome into smaller, more organized segments. This relatively cautious approach was denounced by Venter as slow, unnecessary and costly. A truce was agreed and celebrated in a White House ceremony in June 2000 before competing draft footage was released in February in Lyon.

Venter later revealed that much of the DNA used in Celera’s decoding efforts came from his own cells, much to the chagrin of scientists who felt he had subverted standard DNA donor selection processes and behaved selfishly. “I’ve been accused of this so many times, I’ve gotten over it,” he responded. Regardless, using his own DNA revealed he had abnormal fat metabolism and a high risk of Alzheimer’s disease, so he was now taking lipid-lowering medications to reduce its impact, he added.

Later that year, Venter was fired as Celera director by Tony White, the chairman of Applera – who owned the company – and who wanted the company to move away from the genetic sequencing business and into the much more lucrative field of drug discovery. Venter was deemed unfit to carry out such a goal.

“I sought comfort in the one thing I knew would cheer me up: I walked to my boat and set sail for the turquoise seas of St. Barts…in the Caribbean,” he recalled in Life Decoded. He returned to use his huge win to endow the J Craig Venter Institute with $100 million. There, he could pursue projects including the design of energy-producing microbes and the synthesis of bacterial genomes. He later created two other companies, Human Longevity and Diploid Genomics, which aim to combine artificial intelligence with advances in aging research and gene sequencing to increase human lifespan and diagnose diseases.

As for Venter’s assertions in Lyon about the preponderant power of the environment in determining human behavior, revealed by our low number of genes, they have since been rigorously questioned by scientists. Just because humans have many different traits doesn’t mean we have to have lots of genes, they point out.

Nature has simply found a way to allow our genes to do increasingly sophisticated management work, said Sir John Sulston, one of the leaders of Britain’s public genome effort, in response to Venter’s claims. As we move up the complexity ladder, we simply increase the variety and subtlety of genes, Sulston told the Guardian at the end of the Lyon conference.

Venter was married three times and had a son, Christopher, from his first marriage to Barbara Rae, in 1968; they divorced in 1980. His marriage to Fraser in 1981 ended in divorce in 2005. Three years later, he married Heather Kowalski, who had been his press secretary at Celera. She survives him, as do Christopher and three siblings, Keith, Gary and Suzanne.