Craig venter net worth
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Craig venter john sulston biography death Video Francis S. Patel Eli Ruckenstein Kenneth N. Heilmeier Luna B. Authority control databases.Craig Venter began the race to sequence the human genome when he unexpectedly announced to a room full of genome researchers that they could just quit now, thank you, because his company would finish the job. People who like him say he never filters his thoughts and he shoots from the hip. Others have been less diplomatic, calling him an egomaniac, an idiot, and a shallow man.
John Craig Venter was born on October 14, in Salt Lake City, the youngest son of an excommunicated Mormon who drank too much, smoked too much, and died at The family moved to a working class suburb south of San Francisco and lived in a house next to the train tracks.
Venter enjoyed playing chicken with the trains and surfing the chilly waves in nearby Half Moon Bay.
In high school, Venter excelled in shop class. After graduating, he moved to Newport Beach to surf warmer waves, and then enlisted in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Detecting more intelligence in him than his high school record indicated, the Navy trained him as a medical corpsman and shipped him to the Da Nang hospital.
"I was there during the Tet offensive," he said. "I got introduced to medicine in probably the toughest way possible.
Craig venter john sulston biography children Wilson Robert H. PLoS Biology. Nirenberg Francis P. Archived from the original on November 7,I just got fascinated with the lack of knowledge we had and had a desire to do something more."
After finishing his tour - which included two stints in the brig for disobeying orders - Venter went to the University of California, San Diego to become a doctor. He was deflected from that path by a class with Gordon Sato and a project with Nate Kaplan.
"I got so fascinated with science," he said, "I decided to heck with medical school."
Venter breezed through his undergraduate and graduate schooling in six years, worked at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and was recruited to the National Institutes of Health in
In the early s, Venter developed the EST method of finding genes, and promoted it as cheaper and faster than the Human Genome Project that was just getting started.
Project administrators disagreed, but in the meantime, the NIH decided to patent Venter's gene fragments.
Craig venter john sulston biography wikipedia Since then he has carried out a wide range of genetical and developmental studies on the nematode but his major research has been on the developmental lineage and mutations that affect it. Simon Anne Anastasi George J. S2CID Venter has been the subject of articles in several magazines, including Wired , [ 64 ] The Economist , [ 65 ] Australian science magazine Cosmos , [ 66 ] [ 67 ] and The Atlantic.The Patent Office eventually rejected the patents, but the applications sparked an international controversy over patenting genes whose functions were still unknown. The Human Genome Project's director, James Watson, opposed patenting and quit. Venter left NIH to form his own non-profit institute, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR).
Venter continued EST work at TIGR, but also began thinking about sequencing entire genomes. Again, he came up with a quicker and faster method: whole genome shotgun sequencing.
Craig venter john sulston biography In May , a team of scientists led by Venter became the first to successfully create what was described as " synthetic life ". Retrieved March 3, Mindlin Robert N. Oliver Robert Byron Bird H.He applied for an NIH grant to use the method on Hemophilus influenzae, but started the project before the funding decision was returned. When the genome was nearly complete, NIH rejected his proposal saying the method would not work.
As he turned his focus to the human genome, Venter left TIGR and started the for-profit company Celera, a division of PE Biosystems, the company that makes the latest and greatest sequencing machines.
Using these machines, and the world's largest civilian supercomputer, Venter finished assembling the human genome in just three years.
Venter lives with his wife - Claire Fraser, president and director of TIGR - outside Washington, D.C. where he keeps his tablesaws in the garage, safely away from his new Porsche. Venter relaxes by sailing his 80 foot yacht, The Sorcerer, across the Atlantic ().