Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Craig Venter has died

jcvi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Craig Venter has died

#71

Post by unsupp0rted »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #65
unsupp0rted wrote: post #47

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.

I'd MUCH rather consider the completeness of my experience based on what I was able to experience, rather than how long I'd lived for. Sorry for the tangent, but this is a pet peeve of mine. From my perspective, it seems like our modern quest for safety in all things has the effect of wrapping the whole world, and ourselves, in bubble wrap. The goal seems to be to extend that number as far as possible, without regard…

The longer your lifespan, the more chances you have to waste chunks of it in a rut of zero experience, but have time to work your way out of it.

At just 60 ~ 90 years, a rut of a single decade can take up > 15% of your lifespan.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#72

Post by unsupp0rted »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #69
unsupp0rted wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know it's cliche, but if he knew he (any of us) knew we might live to 790, would we live life so fully? I kind of think that's what is behind some people versus others—those that have an intrinsic, constant sense of the brevity of life are the ones that try to experience life to the fullest.

Yes. A lot of people would live life so fully if they knew they had 790 years: in fact more so.

Right now the most ambitious projects people start barely scratch a decade or two.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#73

Post by unsupp0rted »

patcon wrote: post #55
unsupp0rted wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recognize and appreciate that you likely believe your contribution is one of optimism, but respectfully, I feel ill reading things like this. Ever heard of Chesterton's fence? I don't believe we are more clever than our mother, the computational machinery of the universe. If we remove death, there will be great consequence. Heck, it's arguable that the slow decline and death spiral we're in on this planet (empathat…

Why didn't anybody warn Alexander Fleming about Chesterton's fence?

Re: Craig Venter has died

#74

Post by crispyambulance »

RIP. He was an amazing human. I worked for a time at JCVI when it was in Rockville, shortly after he had left Celera Genomics. He led a team that did something which was considered intractably difficult-- sequencing whole genomes. Then he did it again with global ocean sampling and synthetic genomics and other things. That is not to say that "he did it single-handedly", Venter was a hybrid of scientific and organizational talent that was able to make this stuff happen by coordinating stuff that's super hard to coordinate.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#75

Post by elmolino89 »

CrazyStat wrote: post #67
randogp wrote: post #38

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…

I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big sample sizes should be, and trying to use radically larger samples runs into all sorts of barriers ranging from ethics concerns (for animal experiments) to funding. At the end of the day there's only so…

Lack of appropriate funding leads to cutting corners to the point that some results may not be worth the price of the paper to describe them. I had a passing experience with epigenetics. Even experiments with basically free of ethics issues cell lines could be screwed up by using single end, too short sequencing reads. Combined with too low coverage, less than perfect controls it gives the input data I which the state of the art peak callers will just throw the towel. So the "trick" is to use some way more forgiving peak caller and get a rather crappy results. Using the outdated human genome assembly (hg19), and old genome mapping programs just puts an extra cherry on the cake...

Re: Craig Venter has died

#76

Post by kjs3 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #61
mcmcmc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely that he would live most of those years with compounding mental and physical health issues, quality of life degrading to the point where most would wish for death instead.

What an un-hacker ethos: the idea is to continuously fix problems so that, if anything, quality of life improves from year to year.

"un-hacker ethos". I'll put that on the shelf next to "it's only an engineering problem" and "assume a spherical cow".

Re: Craig Venter has died

#77

Post by kjs3 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #47
Aeroi wrote: 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.

What is sad is having a world view where the value of a human life is duration, not accomplishment.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#78

Post by kjs3 »

shevy-java wrote: post #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 proj…

* I can't say for certain whether my memory fails me, or Wikipedia seems to "forget". *

Sure it does. Some 'editor' decides the article violates some arcane 'rule', or doesn't like the content for some reason, or doesn't like you for some reason, and poof.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#79

Post by xyhopguy »

codeulike wrote: post #46
epistasis wrote: post #29

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…

He wasn't the only one who saw the problem computationally. Famously, the mathematician Michael Waterman sat on the other-side of the race for the human genome.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#80

Post by epistasis »

codeulike wrote: post #46
epistasis wrote: post #29

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…

It was very obvious that it was a computational problem, all DNA analysis was highly computational then, as it is now. His guess was that ~500bp fragments would be enough to get a usable assembly.

But the Human Genome Project's approach of reconstructing larger chunks first was also feasible, and produced an assembly too, with a heroic four weeks effort of a former game programmer who even built cluster software at the same time.

Post reply on HN