20/20 Human Genome Pioneer Continues to Push the Envelope

by Chris Anderson, Senior Editor

Venter admits he is an impatient man. And it

was likely this impatience that led him, while

heading The Institute for Genomic Research

(TIGR), to feud with NIH officials reluctant to

embrace his ideas on how to pursue sequencing

the human genome. Convinced the clone-by-

clone method employed by government

scientists as part of the Human Genome Project

(HGP) was too plodding and with TIGR left off

the list of groups selected to contribute to HGP,

he left the effort in 1998 for Celera Genomics.

Flush with a couple of hundred million dollars

raised from private investors, Venter built an

operation at Celera that ran around the clock

using shotgun sequencing and, in the process,

fired the starting pistol of a public-private race

to complete sequencing the first human genome.

In forging his own path and insisting the

shotgun approach would yield results

significantly faster, Venter was on the butt

end of some blunt and often brutal criticism,

including from the man directing the

multi-national HGP and current Director of

NIH, Francis Collins, who infamously said that

Celera’s approach would produce the “Mad

Magazine version of the genome.” Yet less than

two years later, in June 2000, there was Venter

in the White House with President Clinton and

Collins, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair

via satellite, as a central figure in announcing

the first draft of the human genome.

At times awkward and at others conciliatory,

the White House event was notable in that

Clinton’s opening remarks only made an oblique

reference to the rivalry. But when tossed to 10

Downing Street in London, Blair said almost

immediately “I would like to mention the

imaginative work of Celera and Dr. Craig Venter

who, in the best spirit of scientific competition,

has helped accelerate today’s achievement.”

It’s a long way from Venter’s beginnings to

being praised by world leaders. It’s also unlikely

his grade school and high school teachers

would have pegged a young Craig Venter as

a scientific pioneer. “I avoided school and

didn’t do well because I was not good at rote

memorization. I found it really boring,” he

told the Journal of Precision Medicine recently.

And he admits he drove his parents to distraction

as a 7th grader when he flat out refused to take

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We talk to a visionary about their career path in science, how it has shaped their current perspective in this evolving field and ask for some predictions for the future of Precision Medicine.

Say what you will about J. Craig Venter – and opinions run the gamut from him being our generation’s greatest scientist to him also being its greatest egomaniac – but he gets things done. His CV is dotted with accomplishments any one of which most people would be happy to call their crowning career achievement: sequencing the first genome, the first draft of the human genome, the first complete human genome and creating the first synthetic organism.

spelling tests at school. “I thought it was just

stupid to memorize words in order to regurgitate

them later on a spelling test.” Yet he still sees

those early school experiences as one of the

reasons for his success as a scientist, noting that

he “didn’t have the curiosity beaten out of me

by the system. I maintained my raw curiosity

because I was out on my own exploring things.”

After turning down a college swimming

scholarship and dabbling with the idea of

becoming a professional surfer, Venter, like

so many of his generation, was drafted in 1965

and soon found himself stationed at the

military hospital in Da Nang, Vietnam. “That

was a huge positive influence on my life,

because I ended up in the medical corps and

helping to deal with a lot more medicine and

trauma than most physicians do in their lives,”

Image courtesy of Reuters

When speaking about the future of Human

Longevity, despite the slow progress since

the release of the first human genome, one

gets the sense that Venter feels we are at a

tipping point. “When our first human

genome took a hundred million dollars and

you get just one, well that’s not a scalable

operation. Now, each of the machines we

have at Human Longevity is the equivalent

of 13,050 complete Celera genome operations,”

he pointed out. “We have 24 of these machines

and we will be adding on. So it is 24 times

13,050 – that is our increase over what we

could do 15 years ago at Celera.”

Venter on……luring Franz Och from Google to work at Human Longevity“He led the effort to build Google Translate and has now gotten it so they can translate 90 languages all into each other just using machine learning and other tools. I convinced him that translating the human genome code is the biggest translation challenge in history.”

…de-identified genomic data“It is a bogus notion that you de-identify the human genome sequence. That is why there won’t be public databases of genomes unless there is a huge population of people that are happy to have their genomes and medical records laid bare in the public domain.”

…the founding of Celera Genomics“I was clearly at the right place at the right time with the right irreverent attitude to take on racing the entire federal government science system, to the biggest prize in modern science and biology.”

…serving in the medical corps in Vietnam“I learned that for treating people and saving lives, knowledge is power. The more I had, the more lives I could save, the more effective I could be at my job. It’s a shame more people don’t learn those lessons earlier in their lives.”

…the Human Genome Project Findings“The biggest news when we published the first human genome 15 years ago was the small number of human genes. Most people in science wanted there to be a very large number, so there was one gene for each human trait. They wanted this nice linear world, versus the complex nature of biology.”

genes whose functions are unknown.

~There are some genes where all that

is known is that without them you

cannot get life-even in bacteria with very

small genomes . “I think that is an important

message about biology overall,” Venter said. “If

that is true for a tiny genome of a small bacte-

rial cell, when we hear people talk as though

they know what the function of genes are in

the human genome, hopefully people take that

with a grain of salt.”

Late last year, Venter, now 68, handed over

leadership of Synthetic Genomics to ex-Cubist

Pharmaceuticals executive Oliver Fetzer

to focus on his newest company, Human

Longevity Inc. With the heady goal of solving

“the diseases of aging by changing the way

he said. Upon returning to California, he

enrolled in a community college and later at

the University of California, San Diego with

the intention of becoming a physician. While

there, he met Nathan Kaplan, one of the early

pioneers in molecular biology and soon after

Venter switched paths to the study of basic

science. The switch came as a result of his

first published scientific paper “Biologically

Active Catecholamines Covalently Bound to

Glass Beads” as a junior in 1972. “Making a

breakthrough in science is probably one of the

most gratifying things a person can do and it

became very addictive very quickly,” he said.

If scientific breakthroughs are relatively rare,

Venter can feed his inner adrenaline junky with

any number of the sports cars or motorcycles,

both old and new, he is fond of collecting. On

the day of his interview with the JOPM he had

driven a Tesla to work because “I try to balance

my high octane habits with some environmental

sensitivity.”

More than just a hobby, running his cars at

6,000 RPMs allows him to quiet his equally

revved mind, as it constantly searches for new

scientific innovations. “When you are driving

a race car down the track at 150 miles per hour,

you don’t have time to think about other

things,” he pointed out. “And I think one of

the successes that I’ve had, with constant

innovation and new ideas, is breaking the cycle

of focusing on those things all the time with

other activities that require 100 percent intense

concentration.”

These days, Venter is involved with a handful of

companies and organizations looking to build

on his genomic work, including the J. Craig

Venter Institute (JCVI), founded in 2006, and

Synthetic Genomics, which he started with

fellow JCVI scientist Hamilton Smith. It was

at Synthetic Genomics that Venter and his

research team made yet another breakthrough

in 2010 – the creation of the first living organism

designed by man using synthetic DNA.

Since that time, researchers have attempted to

design a new species in silico, based on first

principals, and then build it and get it to live.

Those efforts have not borne fruit, mostly due

to the fact that there are still a vast number of

medicine is practiced,” the company’s mission

reflects Venter’s penchant for thinking big. In

order to accomplish this, the company will

look to integrate the strength of new technologies

in sequencing and informatics, with advances

es in genomics and stem cell research. HLI

plans to feed this research platform by

building the world’s largest genotype

and phenotype database, aiming to

have one million complete human

genomes by the end of the decade.

“Our goal is to build this large data

base very quickly at a scale that

is beyond what anybody else

is even considering and

applying these new

computing approaches,”

Venter said.

Illustration by Gabriel Moreno