Photograph by Amy Eckert
In 1998 J. Craig Venter burst into the public consciousness with the audacious announcement that his new company, Celera Genomics, would mount a rival effort to the $3 billion 15-year Human Genome Project spearheaded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Venter said his private company would beat the public effort by four years, finishing in 2001 instead of 2005. After a bitter rivalry, the two projects completed rough drafts of the genome in the summer of 2000. President Bill Clinton presided over a ceremony that declared the race a tie. Venter was criticized by the public project scientists, led by Francis Collins, for planning to profit from the data. Venter later released the information free. Since leaving Celera in 2002, the former California surfer and Vietnam War medic founded the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, which funds two projects he is working on—one to create new life in a laboratory, the other to catalog as many genes as possible during an around-the-world ocean voyage on his yacht.
Were you good at science when you were young?
V: I was bored with school. I refused to take spelling tests because I thought it was really stupid to memorize words only to regurgitate them on a spelling test. As a result, I can’t spell very well today. Then what I saw in Vietnam as a medic was a direct correlation: When I had specific knowledge, I could save people’s lives. I was planning on going into medicine, but when I got to the University of California, I started making major science breakthroughs and published my first paper as an undergraduate. I just found it so thrilling and intellectually rewarding that I gave up on the idea of medicine and stayed in science.
