Craig Venter: DNA's Mapmaker: "Who could ever have imagined that a surfer working as a night clerk at Sears, Roebuck & Co. (S ) would eventually become the driving force behind the race to read the genetic code of humanity? That's the unlikely story of J. Craig Venter, a brash biologist who engineered a major leap in scientific knowledge -- and earned millions -- by masterminding efforts to probe the DNA of everything from microbes to man.
Venter might not have broken his surfing habit were it not for the Vietnam War, he says. Faced with the draft, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and ended up as a medical corpsman patching wounds in a hospital in Da Nang. 'I got a lifetime of education packed into one year,' he recalls.
He came back to the U.S. energized and ambitious, zipping through college and a PhD in six years and landing at the National Institutes of Health in 1984. At the time, scientists were spending years finding individual genes. But Venter had a better idea. He quickly fished out the copies of many genes that cells make and use in the production of proteins. Then he employed a new sequencing machine to analyze the code in these genes rapidly.
Soon Venter had sequenced parts of hundreds of genes -- and became the center of a firestorm when the NIH filed patents on them. 'Outrageous,' fumed Nobel Laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's structure. He charged that Venter's semi-automated operation 'could be run by monkeys.' Venter was unrepentant. 'I had three strikes against me,' he recalls. 'I had a radical idea, it worked, and I was an outsider.'
Venter then became even more of a maverick. He snared venture capital bucks to set up his own nonprofit research institute, linked to a company called Human Genome Science (HGSI ) that would get first crack at the genes he found. There he pioneered a technique dubbed 'whole genome shotgun sequencing' to read all the DNA in an organism quickly, not just the 2% in the genes themselves. The "
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