Craig Venter, leader of a commercial effort which paralleled the government’s Human Genome Project (HGP), has died. Venter passed away less than six months after his frequent rival James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and first director of the HGP.
Whereas Watson had been working towards a human genome his whole career, Venter started in the field in the middle of his. Watson and Venter clashed on both style and technique, which resulted in Venter’s leaving NIH and starting his own commercial firm, Celera Genomics.
Venter pioneered a technique known as “shotgun sequencing.” As is often the case with Moore’s law-based technologies, Celera was able to take only a couple years to catch up with the decade-long HGP. The competition is credited with spurring on both efforts, resulting in a tie for both announcement (Venter at 30:22 in this video from the White House) and publication (HGP in Nature, Celera in Science).
Both Venter and Watson would go on to be among the first humans to have their entire genome sequenced.
