J. Craig Venter, a scientist whose relentless ambition helped turn genetics from an artisanal trade into an industrialized information machine, died Wednesday at 79. The cause was side effects of a cancer treatment.
Along the way, he did things that can only be described as really cool. He raced against a government-funded project to sequence the first human genome, grabbing headlines around the world; traveled the ocean in his sailboat collecting genetic information about sea life; and removed a bacterium’s genome and rebooted the organism with an identical set of genes he and his team had synthesized. He drove fast cars, drank red wine, and pissed people off.
Here’s the thing — the mythos of the man gets in the way of understanding the scientist and his importance. And Venter was easy to misunderstand. Scientists thought he was a crazy, greedy businessman. Business people thought he was a crazy, greedy scientist.
I think he viewed himself as a scientist who used the business world to get science done. And that means that in some ways, though Venter was famous, he was not famous for the reasons he is worth remembering. His biggest accomplishments — helping create the fields of genomics and synthetic biology — don’t map entirely to his biggest headlines.
He also personified two divides that still shape science and biotechnology. What happens when you do science for profit? And how does medicine change depending on if you are a biohacker or traditional doctor?
I first encountered Venter 25 years ago, when I was a young reporter. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I started covering biotech because I was fascinated by the company he was running, Celera Genomics, which aimed to be first to sequence the human genome — and was racing the government-funded Human Genome Project to do it. It was a story in which capitalist innovation and the public good seemed in perfect tension.
Except Venter’s story was more complicated. A lackluster student who found drive and ambition after returning from Vietnam, he eventually became a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, where his 1980s efforts to discover individual gene sequences led to them being patented. He would later insist he had always been opposed to gene patents, and that the NIH had made the decision on its own; still, he was vilified for it.
In 1992 he left to found The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR, like the cat; much later it became The J. Craig Venter Institute). At TIGR, working with the Nobel laureate Ham Smith, Venter led an effort to do something that had never been done before: he sequenced the genome of an organism, a bacterium.
This, to me, was in some ways his biggest achievement: not that he climbed a particular mountain, but that he and Smith invented mountain climbing. The two would remain scientifically linked until Smith’s death last year.
TIGR had its own commercial entanglements. It was funded by a biotechnology firm, Human Genome Sciences, that got access to its data. The relationship, like many in Venter’s career, ended in rancor.
A race to sequence the human genome
At the time of that first sequence, the Human Genome Project was already in full swing, having begun in 1990.
Then came the call that set up a face-off between the government and industry. PE Biosystems, the company that sold the DNA sequences that the Human Genome Project used, decided it wanted to start its own effort to sequence the human genome. It called Venter to run the effort. That became Celera Genomics, founded in 1998.
From one perspective Celera was brilliant. Its parent company, PE Corp., could sell DNA sequencers both to Celera and the genome project, selling metaphorical shovels in a gold rush.
If there was upside to owning the genome itself, it might own the whole thing. Hopes for that pushed Celera’s market capitalization to a stunning $14 billion.
The animating fear of news coverage at the time was that Celera’s data would be important, and locked away from the public.] But though Venter raced the public project to a standstill — the two groups announced a tie on the White House lawn — the result, in business terms, was murkier.
Venter’s vision, of scientists and drug companies paying to access Celera’s genetic data, never really came to pass. It and its peers, companies like Human Genome Sciences and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, mostly found other business models.
In the end the whole idea behind these companies was a commercial flop. Genetics would change drug discovery, but not until the cost of sequencing a human being’s genome went way down and lots and lots of people could be sequenced. Now numerous medicines targeted against specific genes are approved every year, and genetic sequencing is standard for many cancers. The world Venter envisioned has started to come into focus.
During the race between the Human Genome Project and Celera, not only Celera but also firms like Human Genome Sciences, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Curagen and Incyte Genomics ended up with massive stock market valuations. It was a bubble.
Venter got lucky in an odd way; he couldn’t sell his own Celera shares, as an executive. But he gifted some of them to his foundation, which sold half of them, netting $150 million and funding his scientific work after was fired from Celera in 2002. (Celera was sold to Quest Diagnostics for just $344 million in 2011.)
Cue all that cool science on microbes, and the revelation that the genome he sequenced at Celera was largely his own. (Venter said he felt he should go first; others saw evidence of his ego.)
After he was fired from Celera, Venter started companies, but he wasn’t really an entrepreneur. He was much more a scientist with big, crazy ideas — that we’d all look at our genomes for medical information, or that we’d build cells from scratch to combat climate change — who was good at telling stories about the future and getting funding. The salty sea captain beard and the piercing stare, perfect for magazine covers, did not hurt.
In Venter’s vision, sequencing a genome and gathering other data through diagnostic tests could result in the same kind of extension of human health and fitness. The last time I wrote about him, he was selling a kind of executive physical, including a whole genome scan, at a company called Human Longevity. The idea was that the data from the high-end physicals would help lead to scientific discoveries. I thought it made no sense for me, then a healthy man in his forties, to undergo a CT scan to look for atherosclerosis in my heart arteries, called a calcium score.
“In Vietnam, I used to do autopsies on 18-to-22-year-olds, and a lot of them had cardiovascular disease,” he told me. “We find things. The question is what you do with it.”
My arteries looked clear. I’m still not sure it made any sense to get that calcium score. But the man was convincing.
Last night, after learning Venter had died, I found myself contrasting him with another scientific giant we’d recently lost: Eugene Braunwald, who in the 1960s helped cement the realization that heart attacks are not a thing that happens in a moment but through a whole biological process of clotting and muscle destruction.
This meant that heart attacks could be stopped, and led to Braunwald running a group at Harvard that conducted clinical trials that changed the way we treat heart disease. Heart attacks have become far less deadly as a result. Braunwald was not nearly as famous as Venter, but his work saves millions of lives each year.
I live in Braunwald’s world. I write about the long, slow process of testing drugs in clinical trials. I take a cholesterol-lowering statin every morning. I’ve had my genome sequenced twice, but am not sure I really learned anything from either. But I still live in the hope that someday, I’ll get to live in the world as Craig Venter saw it.
Did Venter have an ego? Sure. Anyone who was going to take on the human genome, a project that required herding scientists into veritable armies, had to. But he found a way to get the science done. And he moved science forward — slower than he would have liked, but faster than anyone else dared hope.
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