Craig Venter has died

I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.

He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.

He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.

Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2].

1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity

2: https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/

When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair).

Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald.

A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time..

A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work.

Basically Venter and his accomplishments have been the background to my entire adult career in biology, genetics, bioinformatics and machine learning.

RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!

Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.

Sad news. I met Craig very briefly at a conference probably a decade back. I pretty much was a self-study in genetics at the time... so let's just say I wasn't in Craig's league. Despite this he was very engaged and took the time for a very thoughtful chat.

RIP Craig Venter.

I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there.

Thank you Craig Venter!

He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.

Great scientist, but Celera was the worst financial investment I ever made.

RIP. I absolutely loved the book A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter.

An interesting footnote in the Human Genome Project (or rather, the cataloguing immediately afterward) is that no one knew how many genes there would be. Of 460 bettors, only three people (correctly) guessed there would be fewer than 30,000 genes.

That's unexpected. He was only 80, and as I understand it still working.

My his memory be a blessing.

I went to a talk of his once and discovered that I also have aphantasia. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy the little I interacted with him. RIP

I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.

The bad boy of science!

Oh no! I did an internship at his lab when I went to UCSD. RIP.

Sad news. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk was interesting back in the day

You can definitely say that ego was the fountainhead of progress for him!