Overview
- J. Craig Venter, 79, died Wednesday in San Diego following a brief hospitalization for unexpected side effects from cancer therapy, according to the J. Craig Venter Institute.
- He helped transform DNA decoding by championing whole‑genome shotgun sequencing, which reads many small DNA pieces and uses software to assemble them, and his team proved it by completing the first free‑living bacterial genome in 1995.
- Venter founded Celera Genomics in 1998 and led a high‑profile race with the publicly funded Human Genome Project, with both sides unveiling draft human genomes in 2000 and publishing landmark papers in 2001 that also spotlighted fights over data access and commercialization.
- He led global ocean sampling expeditions that applied metagenomics to seawater, revealing vast microbial diversity and millions of previously unknown genes and protein families.
- In 2010 his group reported a bacterial cell controlled by a lab‑synthesized genome, a feat praised as a leap for synthetic biology and questioned by some over what counts as creating new life.