J. Craig Venter, who won the race to sequence the human genome, dies at 79
J. Craig Venter, who mapped the first draft of the human genome and helped scientists understand how genes shape our lives, died Wednesday. He was 79 years old.
Venter’s death was announced by the J. Craig Venter Institute, a genomics research group based in La Jolla, California, and Rockville, Maryland. The institute said he died in San Diego after being hospitalized for side effects of recent cancer treatment.
In the 1990s, Venter bet that he could use a different sequencing technique to speed up the process of decoding the human genome and defeat a massive government effort called the Human Genome Project. And in 2000, Venter’s private company Celera Genomics announced, along with leaders of the Human Genome Project, that they had decoded the 3.1 billion subunits of DNA, the chemical “letters” that make up the recipe for human life. Three years later, in April 2003, the project declared the genome complete.
“Some have told me that sequencing the human genome will shrink humanity by eliminating the mystery of life,” Venter said at a White House event in 2000 about the advance. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
And his work has revealed even greater mysteries – even as it has helped scientists understand the genetic causes of rare diseases and more common conditions such as heart disease and cancer, as well as mutations or changes that can put people at higher risk of disease.
Venter, who served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, said the experience taught him how fragile life could be and made him curious about how the billions of cells in the human body conspire to create and sustain life.
He also worked at the National Institutes of Health, where he helped develop a technique to rapidly identify large swaths of human genes.
He later was the first to publish his own sequenced genome in the hope that researchers could scan it to discover what was inherited from each parent and where vulnerabilities to disease lay, opening the door to one day tailoring future treatments to a person’s genes. He and his team also achieved a breakthrough in synthetic biology by creating a bacterial cell with laboratory-synthesized DNA.
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