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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.
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/
So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:
https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com...
The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.
But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it).
> After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1]
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/04/223919/craig-ven...
> Linnaeus is designated as the type specimen for the human species, Homo sapiens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus
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!
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!
I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.
here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/
My his memory be a blessing.
Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.