J. Craig Venter, RIP
The Great American Salesman who heroically hugely sped up the Human Genome Project also was the prime origin of the Race Does Not Exist, Genetically snake oil.
J. Craig Venter was the hero of the Human Genome Project, the entrepreneur who lit a fire under the sleepy government effort the way Elon Musk has lit a fire under space exploration.
From the New York Times:
J. Craig Venter, Scientist Who Decoded the Human Genome, Dies at 79
A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.
By Nicholas Wade
It’s good to see Wade, age 87, getting a byline in the NYT even for an obituary he likely wrote long ago.
April 30, 2026, 12:29 a.m. ET
J. Craig Venter, a scientist and entrepreneur who raced to decode the human genome, died on Wednesday in San Diego. He was 79.
… In the 1990s, Dr. Venter, a risk-taker and intense competitor, made a bold move when he decided that the Human Genome Project, a $3 billion government program for decoding the human genome, was moving slowly enough that he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method.
His gamble paid off. In 2000, his company, Celera, made a joint announcement with a rival group saying that they had assembled the first human genomes, a landmark step toward uncovering the genetic basis of human disease and origins.
Dr. Venter had a powerful ego. That was clear when he let slip that the anonymous donor whose genome Celera had sequenced was none other than his own.
But his drive and management skills helped him inspire loyalty and assemble teams of exceptional scientists, including the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Hamilton O. Smith.
Venter helped bring a needed Big Data orientation to genetics in the 1990s.
The data demands of the human genome would have been hugely daunting in the 1980s, but Venter realized it would rapidly become manageable.
Was Venter The Man who figured everything out? Or was he The Manager who hired The Man or The Men?
Beats me.
But even just being The Manager who hires The Man and gives him room to run (or The Men) is certainly an honorable role, too.
Together, they achieved one landmark after another in the nascent field of genomics.
In 1995, Dr. Venter revolutionized microbiology when he published the sequence of DNA letters in the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, the first bacterial genome to be decoded, along with annotations of all the organism’s genes.
The moment electrified science. For the first time, researchers could see all the genetic components of a free-living organism, giving microbiologists a manual for bacterium’s genetic tool kit. …
His team next turned to the fruit fly genome to test whether their approach, known as a whole-genome shotgun sequencing, could work on its biggest target: the human genome. …
Venter’s ex-wife Barbara Rae-Venter, a Ph.D. retired patent attorney, went on to more or less invent in 2018 modern amateur cold case genetic sleuthing. She used genetic genealogy techniques to identify the Golden State Killer, who was convicted in 2020 for 13 murders committed in the 1970s-1989s.
Extremely intelligent women, like Dr. Rae-Venter, who are into both true crime shows and family relationships have my whole-hearted support for their recent impressive track record of finally bringing vicious criminals to justice.
Decoding the human genome, Dr. Venter’s next big challenge, became the focus of a competition between his team at Celera against a consortium of academic rivals led by the United States and Britain. The National Institutes of Health, a major patron of the effort, refused to cooperate with Dr. Venter, who instead secured private funding from the Celera Corporation.
Dr. Venter’s whole genome shotgun method enabled him to erase his rivals’ head start. With ample time and money, he might have seized this greatest of scientific prizes. Instead, he agreed, reluctantly, to accept the consortium’s offer of a formal draw, with the trappings of a White House ceremony with President Bill Clinton.
My guess is that Venter’s 2000 White House ceremony speech was the origin of today’s “Race Does Not Exist” delusion.
As I wrote …
Paywall here.
