>Later, his idea of then taking shotgun sequencing and applying it to whatever DNA you could find floating in the Sargasso Sea or any random teaspoon of dirt li

>Later, his idea of then taking shotgun sequencing and applying it to whatever DNA you could find floating in the Sargasso Sea or any random teaspoon of dirt literally opened a whole new world of evolutionary biology. This field is called metagenomics and Venter did not come up with the idea nor was the first to publish in it. There was a 2002 paper of shotgun environmental DNA sequencing on viral communities, and the Tyson + Banfield 2004 paper came out in March while his came out in April. Craig gave metagenomics some needed publicity but I don't think anyone would say he advanced the field or contributed much to how metagenomics is done today.