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Craig Venter has died

jcvi.org

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Re: Craig Venter has died

#41
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. For folks looking for more:

* Celera genome, first published 2004: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/genome/GCF_000002115.1...

* Human reference genome, first published 2001 and most recently updated in 2022: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/genome/GCF_000001405.4...

Re: Craig Venter has died

#42
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Craig Venter has died

#43
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…

"RP11" is that man from Buffalo who comprises 74% of the human reference genome [1].

[1] https://undark.org/2024/07/09/informed-consent-human-genome-...

Re: Craig Venter has died

#44
This is (specifically) unfortunate - let me explain why.

Some comments are critical of Craig; this may be understandable as he always liked having media focus on either his personality or on what he is/was doing.

Craig was, in my opinion, mostly a business person first, scientist second, but I think he was also genuinely fascinated and interested in science. Others already brought the example of the human genome project (HGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project, although I remember it as HUGO - strange how Wikipedia uses another name for this. I can't say for certain whether my memory fails me, or Wikipedia seems to "forget". Anyway.).

People also stated how the scientists back then got scared by Craig, aka "he will finish before we do, we are too slow", or "he will patent the ESTs and sell it, we must hurry up" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag). This was in the 1990s primarily, late 1990s. Now - I leave everyone to their thoughts here, but in my opinion, Craig kind of was like a destabilizer in a positive manner, in that he got scientists to focus more. Kind of like a shocker system in a defibrillator. A defibrillator isn't extremely enjoyable, but the use case is to try to get a halted heart to pulse again (in the ideal outcome). In some ways I think Craig kind of was like that for the larger scientific community. He became famous during the human genome research, even if media attention was also driven here, and lateron in synthetic biology (first synthetic cell) and some more. One can easily say that everything would have been done or discovered without Craig, that's fine, but in many ways he kind of also acted as an accelerator here. Today research-to-product is really quite rapid; in the 1990s my memory kind of says that we all were slower back then. And while those changes may all have come without Craig too, I think he kind of pushed others towards more effective speed too - perhaps not always positive, but in some cases I think Craig was acting as an accelerator. Which I think is not a net-negative per se. (Also, as for patenting information such as DNA - I am of course, as any logical person, absolutely against that, but the problem here is not Craig, the problem is that the USA has a completely broken patent system. For instance you can patent something but then forbid others from using it AND you yourself also don't use it. I fail to see how this benefits anyone, other than market control and market competition. That should be different. Many more things too, but this is not about the patent situation; it is about critisizing Craig for patents. Numerous others benefit from the patent situation, so why are these not critisized too?)

Re: Craig Venter has died

#46
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…

It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up.

Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem.

So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing

Re: Craig Venter has died

#47
post #22

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 20…

Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up. Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it a…

How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project: https://bioperl.org/articles/How_Perl_saved_human_genome.htm...

Re: Craig Venter has died

#49
post #22

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 20…

Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.

> Only 79… far from a complete human experience

It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.

> Only 79… far from a complete human experience It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.

Imagine what a guy like that could do with 79 more years... or 10x of that.

It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do.

It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.

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