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Craig Venter has died

jcvi.org

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Re: Craig Venter has died

#31

Post by LarsDu88 »

When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair).

Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald.

A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time..

A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work.

Basically Venter and his accomplishments have been the background to my entire adult career in biology, genetics, bioinformatics and machine learning.

RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!

Re: Craig Venter has died

#32

Post by melling »

gwerbret wrote: post #20

Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2]. 1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity 2:…

It appears he had cancer and something about the treatment caused his death.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#36

Post by elmolino89 »

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

I belive you are mixing assembling the genome by combining sequences of individual, overlapping inserts of cosmids, fosmids, PACs and BACs (bacterial vectors with human DNA inserts of 40-150kbp) to whole genome shotgun. The inserts of the above bacterial vectors were sequenced using shotgun, but the gaps in the sequence were closed with custom primers.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#38

Post by randogp »

At the time they announced the full genome sequence I was an intern in molecular biology. We had a thermocycler in the lab and I had to book my slot on a paper agenda. I remember this portrait of him in front of multiple racks each plenty of thermocyclers. He taught me something about scale and he proved that sometimes it's worth looking at what you have and ask what if I could 200x this. In software this might seem obvious with GPU arrays etc.. but when you are trained in a wet lab and the instrument paper agenda, I wonder if we could have more breakthroughs in life sciences if we could use some bruteforce now and then. RIP
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