Remembering J. Craig Venter: a relentless scientist who changed biotech — and was all too easily misunderstood

J. Craig Venter, a scientist whose relentless ambition helped turn genetics from an artisanal trade into an industrialized information machine, died Wednesday at 79. The cause was side effects of a cancer treatment. Along the way, he did things that can only be described as really cool. He raced against a government-funded project to sequence the first human genome, grabbing headlines around the world; traveled the ocean in his sailboat collecting genetic information about sea life; and removed a bacterium’s genome and rebooted the organism with an identical set of genes he and his team had synthesized. He drove fast cars, drank red wine, and pissed people off. Here’s the thing — the mythos of the man gets in the way of understanding the scientist and his importance. And Venter was easy to misunderstand. Scientists thought he was a crazy, greedy businessman. Business people thought he was a crazy, greedy scientist. I think he viewed himself as a scientist who used the business world to get science done. And that means that in some ways, though Venter was famous, he was not famous for the reasons he is worth remembering. His biggest accomplishments — helping create the fields of genomics