Craig Venter was born in 1946 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and served in the US Navy as a field medic during the Vietnam War before turning to study molecular biology. He worked at the US National Institutes of Health, where he developed a rapid technique for identifying gene fragments known as expressed sequence tags, a method that sparked wide controversy over attempts to patent parts of the human genome.
In 1998, Venter founded Celera Genomics and launched a private effort rivaling the international government-led Human Genome Project, using a «whole-genome shotgun sequencing» approach far faster than traditional methods. This competition accelerated both projects, and a first draft of the complete human genome sequence was jointly announced by both teams in June 2000.
From Reading the Genome to Building One
Venter's ambition did not stop at reading the genome; he founded the J. Craig Venter Institute to continue genomic research, and in 2010 his team announced an unprecedented achievement: a bacterial cell running on a genome fully synthesized chemically in the lab, named «Synthia», the first organism in history to run entirely on human-made DNA, founding the modern field of synthetic biology. Venter died in April 2026 at age 79.
