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Craig Venter has died

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Re: Craig Venter has died

#21

Post by acmj »

dnautics wrote: post #6
rdl wrote: post #2

He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.

iiuc it was hamilton smith who insisted that shotgun sequencing would work. the nih side insisted on primer walking until celera started assembling the genome so rapidly that the nih had to get in on shotgun too

No, at initial release, the human genome from the NIH side was done by bac-to-bac, not by shotgun.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#22

Post by Aeroi »

I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.

He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.

He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#25

Post by busterarm »

kingsleyopara wrote: post #11

I went to a talk of his once and discovered that I also have aphantasia. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy the little I interacted with him. RIP

I just read your comment and also just discovered that I have aphantasia.

Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#27

Post by mbreese »

acmj wrote: post #17
dnautics wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him

You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample.

It gets a little fuzzy when talking about Celera and the human genome project. The two efforts were very much competitors, but there was a lot of crossover (mainly from Celera pulling in the public data).

But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it).

> After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/04/223919/craig-ven...

Re: Craig Venter has died

#28

Post by tootie »

jltsiren wrote: post #13
dnautics wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him

Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly. The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons…

I worked on this back in the 90s and there multiple data sets being used. We had one that was Mennonite family with like 5 living generations and 100ish individuals.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#29

Post by epistasis »

apitman wrote: post #3

Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.

"Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable.

So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:

https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com...

Re: Craig Venter has died

#30

Post by acmj »

mbreese wrote: post #27
acmj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample.

It gets a little fuzzy when talking about Celera and the human genome project. The two efforts were very much competitors, but there was a lot of crossover (mainly from Celera pulling in the public data). But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it). > Af…

I am not sure what is "the draft human genome" you are talking about. Two separate human genomes were published in 2001: the HGP genome and the celera genome. The HGP genome then didn't use Venter DNA. It evolved into the current human reference genome. The celera genome contained Venter DNA but it has been completely forgotten nowadays.
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