J. Craig Venter, the ornery, fiercely competitive genomics pioneer, died earlier this year at the age of 79. In the late 1990s, he launched Celera Genomics to challenge the publicly funded Human Genome Project, betting that with enough computing power, whole-genome shotgun sequencing would beat the public project’s more careful map-first approach. In 2000, he stood next to Francis Collins and Bill Clinton as the rival public and private efforts jointly announced their draft sequences of the human genome. Ten years later, his team would announce the creation of the first self-replicating bacterial cell controlled by a synthetic genome. His brash, controversial style made him emblematic of an ascendant, disruptive biotech industry, but won him few friends in the scientific establishment.
My mom picked up his memoir A Life Decoded for me to read in high school. Obviously, it stuck with me, and was probably one of the many reasons I decided to study biology and evolution in undergrad.
For better or worse, Venter made biology feel more like a battlefield than a body of settled knowledge.