Craig Venter, who booted up the first synthetic cell, dies at 79
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingIn 2010, Craig Venter and his colleagues took a bacterial genome they had designed on a computer, assembled it from chemical building blocks, transplanted it into an empty cell, and watched the cell start dividing. The result, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, was the first organism alive on Earth whose parents were a hard drive and a chemistry set. Venter died Tuesday in San Diego at 79, the J. Craig Venter Institute said; he had recently been diagnosed with cancer and was hospitalized for unexpected complications of the treatment.
Most obituaries will lead with the human genome. In 2000, Venter's company, Celera, ran the public Human Genome Project to a near photo finish on the first draft sequence, a private vs. government race that ended in a joint White House announcement and decades of argument over who got there first. Years later, his team produced a high-quality diploid sequence of one person, meaning both copies of each chromosome (one from each parent) were read separately rather than mashed into a single composite reference.
Before that, at the National Institutes of Health, he pioneered a shortcut called expressed sequence tags — short snippets of active genes that let researchers find and map genes far faster than reading entire chromosomes end to end.
He also liked boats. The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition sailed his yacht around the world, scooping up seawater and sequencing whatever DNA was floating in it, which turned up millions of previously unknown microbial genes and a much wider catalog of the protein families that run the ocean.
Venter founded JCVI and co-founded Synthetic Genomics, Human Longevity, and, most recently, Diploid Genomics, which he was running as chief executive when he died.
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