Scientist who won race to sequence human genome dies
J Craig Venter, who mapped the first draft of the human genome and helped scientists understand how genes shape our lives, has died at the age of 79.
Venter’s death on Wednesday was announced by the genomics research group J Craig Venter Institute.
The institute said he died in San Diego after being hospitalized for side effects of recent cancer treatment.
In the 1990s, Venter bet that he could use a different sequencing technique to speed up the process of decoding the human genome and defeat a massive government effort called the Human Genome Project.
And in 2000, Venter’s private company, Celera Genomics, along with leaders of the Human Genome Project, announced that they had decoded 3.1 billion subunits of DNA, the chemical “letters” that form the recipe for human life.
Three years later, in April 2003, the project declared the genome complete.
“Some told me that sequencing the human genome would diminish humanity by removing the mystery from life,” Venter said of the breakthrough at a White House event in 2000.
“Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Although his work has helped scientists understand the genetic causes of rare diseases, as well as more common conditions such as heart disease and cancer, and which mutations or changes put people at higher risk of disease, it has uncovered even greater mysteries.
Venter, who served in the U.S. Navy during Vietnam, said the experience taught him how fragile life can be and made him wonder how the trillions of cells in the human body conspire to create and sustain life.
He also worked at the National Institutes of Health, where he helped develop a technique to rapidly identify large swaths of human genes.
He later became the first to publish his own sequenced genome in the hope that researchers could scan it to learn what was inherited from each parent and where vulnerabilities to disease might lie, opening the door to one day tailoring future treatments to a person’s genes.
He and his team also made a breakthrough in synthetic biology by creating bacterial cells with DNA synthesized in the laboratory.
