Celera’s Venter Has His Fans--and Detractors
To his admirers and shareholders, J. Craig Venter is a corporate wizard of gene deciphering, a magician of the genetic code.
As president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics, his vision has allowed the 2-year-old company to lay claim to what is arguably the more complete of the two versions of the human genome--the genetic instruction manual for the human body.
He has become the scientific spokesman for the new biology, his round face grinning from the pages of news magazines or more somberly seen on television screens as a prophet of the new millennium.
Even his detractors--and he has many among academic scientists--concede that he is a scientist of large ambitions and impressive accomplishments.
But his critics also accuse him of sometimes claiming total credit for work that--like most scientific achievement--rests heavily on the innovations of others. Some of Venter’s claims, they say, are as if Henry Ford claimed to have invented the automobile, rather than simply developing its mass production.
Beating the Odds
Venter, 53, describes his life in Horatio Alger terms.
“I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth, either economically or scientifically,” Venter said in an interview soon after he founded Celera, with the promise of $300 million in backing from PE Corp. He did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.
He also says that he suffers from an unusual impairment that he has turned to his advantage--an inability to visualize faces and other images when not looking at them.
“I have no visual memory,” he said in the 1998 interview. “That’s a tremendous disadvantage going through school with friends who have a perfect, photographic memory. I can’t imagine a photograph.” On the other hand, this inability, he said, “helps tremendously with conceptual thinking.”
Born in Salt Lake City, he was an indifferent student at Mills High School in Millbrae, on the San Francisco peninsula. He even considered dropping out of school to pursue his passion for surfing.
He found purpose, however, in the Navy Medical Corps during a stint in Vietnam, and returned to California to earn a degree in biochemistry followed by a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology from UC San Diego.
As a scientist he studied the way signals travel from one nerve cell to the next, and did well enough to become a research section chief at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md.
By 1991, he harnessed a powerful technique for isolating fragments of DNA called “expressed sequence tags,” or ESTs--a shortcut for identifying hundreds of genes without first having to decode the entire genome.
In 1998, Venter told a congressional subcommittee that he and his colleagues in his federal lab “had developed a new strategy for identifying genes more rapidly and at much less expense than previously had been possible.”
What Venter failed to say was that the technique had been reported in 1983 in the journal Nature by three scientists at MIT--work referenced in his scientific publications, if not his public pronouncements.
“As far as I know, [the Nature paper] was the first time that the global EST approach was ever used,” said Paul Schimmel, one of the paper’s authors and now a professor at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.
Venter’s innovation was to refine the technology and deploy it on a grand scale, said Schimmel, who shrugs off the idea that Venter might not have given him the credit he deserves.
When the federal government sought patents on thousands of these gene fragments, Venter became the center of a raging controversy. James Watson, co-discover of the DNA double helix and director of the National Institutes of Health sequencing effort, was outraged, complaining that the automated sequencing machines used to decode the ESTs “could be run by monkeys.” Although Watson later apologized, he continues to take the same position on gene patents to this day.
Profitable Move
Venter left government to start a nonprofit lab, the Institute for Genomic Research, TIGR for short, with the backing of a new company, Human Genome Sciences. Both Venter and the institute received stock in the new venture. By the time Venter cashed in his shares, they were worth $9 million.
Under Venter, TIGR emerged as a power in gene sequencing, deciphering the genome of several organisms including Haemophilus influenzae--the first free-living organism to have its DNA sequenced.
Breaking with Human Genome Sciences, Venter obtained grants from the government and other sources to continue the work.
In 1998, he stunned the human genome world by joining with PE Corp. to form a new company, Celera Genomics--the name derived from the Latin for “swift.” Venter boasted that the new venture would do in three years what the public Human Genome Project was attempting to do in 15, and for hundreds of millions of dollars rather than billions. The public project researchers were skeptical and considered Venter’s remarks a distortion of their effort.
In the last two months, in private meetings over beer and pizza, Venter and Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, worked out a truce.
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Deciphering the Human Genome
1866
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, first describes hereditary “elements,” now called genes. 1902
A medical student at Columbia University proposes that the genes are contained in chromosomes, found inside almost all cells in the body.
1911
A Columbia researcher, Walter S. Sutton, shows that the gene for colorblindness must sit on the X chromosome.
1944
Oswald Avery and other scientists at Rockefeller University prove that genes are made up of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the stuff of heredity.
1953
James Watson and Francis Crick determine the structure of DNA, a double spiral or helix that divides in two to make copies of itself.
1961-66
Marshall Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana crack the DNA code, showing that it is written in three-letter “words” that code for amino acids.
1977
Britain’s Frederick Sanger uses a method he developed to decode the genome of a living organism, a bacterial virus.
1985
Scientists propose decoding the human genome; Charles DeLisi of the Department of Energy organizes a federal program.
1990
The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy officially launch a 15-year, $3-billion effort to sequence human and other genomes, the Human Genome Project.
1995
The whole genomes of several bacteria are sequenced for the first time.
May 1998
Backed by PE Corp., scientist J. Craig Venter launches Celera Genomics, promising to complete the sequence of the human genome in three years.
October 1998
The public project announces it will finish the human genome two years early, by 2003 and a “working draft” by the end of 2001, later changed to June of 2000.
December 1999
The Human Genome Project announces it has produced a finished sequence of the first human chromosome.
January 2000
Celera announces it has 90% of the human genome in its company database, combining its own sequencing information with that of the public project.
March 2000
Celera and the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project publish a near-complete sequence for the genome of the fly.
April 2000
Celera announces it has completed the sequencing phase for the first human genome.
June 2000
Completion of draft versions of the genome is announced.
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Sources: “The Gene Wars” by Robert Cook-Deegan (W.W. Norton & Co., 1994); Celera Genomics and Human Genome Project news releases; Nobel Foundation
