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Craig Venter has died

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Re: Craig Venter has died

#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.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#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.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#5
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.

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

Re: Craig Venter has died

#6
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

Re: Craig Venter has died

#7
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.

> 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).

I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.

Re: Craig Venter has died

#8
post #7
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.

> 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). I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun ap…

i worked for ham smith and my understanding through him is that both sides relied on data that the other produced.

here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/

Re: Craig Venter has died

#9
I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.
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