4 ms·

Craig Venter has died

342 points by rdl 5mo ago

dyauspitr 5mo ago
Oh no! I did an internship at his lab when I went to UCSD. RIP.
rdl 5mo ago
He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.
- dnautics 5mo ago
  iiuc it was hamilton smith who insisted that shotgun sequencing would work. the nih side insisted on primer walking until celera started assembling the genome so rapidly that the nih had to get in on shotgun too
  - acmj 5mo ago
    No, at initial release, the human genome from the NIH side was done by bac-to-bac, not by shotgun.
  - elmolino89 5mo ago
    I belive you are mixing assembling the genome by combining sequences of individual, overlapping inserts of cosmids, fosmids, PACs and BACs (bacterial vectors with human DNA inserts of 40-150kbp) to whole genome shotgun. The inserts of the above bacterial vectors were sequenced using shotgun, but the gaps in the sequence were closed with custom primers.
- echelon 5mo ago
  > in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.
  - dnautics 5mo ago
    i worked for ham smith and my understanding through him is that both sides relied on data that the other produced. here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/
apitman 5mo ago
Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.
- dnautics 5mo ago
  i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him
  - jltsiren 5mo ago
    Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly. The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.
    - tootie 5mo ago
      I worked on this back in the 90s and there multiple data sets being used. We had one that was Mennonite family with like 5 living generations and 100ish individuals.
    - eweitz 5mo ago
      "RP11" is that man from Buffalo who comprises 74% of the human reference genome [1]. [1] https://undark.org/2024/07/09/informed-consent-human-genome-project/ https://undark.org/2024/07/09/informed-consent-human-genome-...
    - dekhn 5mo ago
      The majority of the genomic sequencing done by Celera for their initial released draft genome was on Venter's sample.
  - moralestapia 5mo ago
alex1138 5mo ago
Sad news. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk was interesting back in the day
koeng 5mo ago
I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.
kingsleyopara 5mo ago
I went to a talk of his once and discovered that I also have aphantasia. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy the little I interacted with him. RIP
- busterarm 5mo ago
  I just read your comment and also just discovered that I have aphantasia. Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
jfengel 5mo ago
That's unexpected. He was only 80, and as I understand it still working. My his memory be a blessing.
jwilliams 5mo ago
Sad news. I met Craig very briefly at a conference probably a decade back. I pretty much was a self-study in genetics at the time... so let's just say I wasn't in Craig's league. Despite this he was very engaged and took the time for a very thoughtful chat.
timcobb 5mo ago
RIP Craig Venter. I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there. Thank you Craig Venter!
gwerbret 5mo ago
Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2]. 1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity 2: https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/ https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/
- melling 5mo ago
  It appears he had cancer and something about the treatment caused his death.
Aeroi 5mo ago
I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies. He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes. He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.
- unsupp0rted 5mo ago
  Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.
  - cowsandmilk 5mo ago
    > Only 79… far from a complete human experience It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.
    - unsupp0rted 5mo ago
      Imagine what a guy like that could do with 79 more years... or 10x of that. It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do. It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.
      - unfitted2545 5mo ago
        A complete human experience is to have relatively little time, no point in doing anything if you have 500 years to do it IMO. Edit: Maybe there wouldn't be nilihism, but I don't think you could get more fulfilled with the extra time. I feel like an insect that lives 24 hours and a shark that lives several hundred have an equal feeling of accomplishment.
subtextminer 5mo ago
You can definitely say that ego was the fountainhead of progress for him!
TuringNYC 5mo ago
RIP. I absolutely loved the book A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter.
Imnimo 5mo ago
The bad boy of science!
LarsDu88 5mo ago
When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair). Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald. A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time.. A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work. Basically Venter and his accomplishments have been the background to my entire adult career in biology, genetics, bioinformatics and machine learning. RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!
- Aeroi 5mo ago
  Great stories. I asked him about the pig thing, after he pivoted from biofuels (I think they raised $150m from Exxon). If I recall he teamed up with another infamous founder Martin, now Martine, Rothblatt who created SeriusXM and United Therapeutics.
PeterStuer 5mo ago
Great scientist, but Celera was the worst financial investment I ever made.
sqlcook 5mo ago
Sad news, I’ve worked at HumanLongevity and got to interact with Craig several times. He was a legend and truly will be missed.
E-Reverance 5mo ago
Interesting comment from him: " SPIEGEL: So you don't consider Collins to be a true scientist? Venter: Let's just say he's a government administrator. " https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/craig-venter-venting https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/craig-venter-venti...
__loam 5mo ago
A giant in biology. This is a real loss.
randogp 5mo ago
At the time they announced the full genome sequence I was an intern in molecular biology. We had a thermocycler in the lab and I had to book my slot on a paper agenda. I remember this portrait of him in front of multiple racks each plenty of thermocyclers. He taught me something about scale and he proved that sometimes it's worth looking at what you have and ask what if I could 200x this. In software this might seem obvious with GPU arrays etc.. but when you are trained in a wet lab and the instrument paper agenda, I wonder if we could have more breakthroughs in life sciences if we could use some bruteforce now and then. RIP
- CrazyStat 5mo ago
  I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big sample sizes should be, and trying to use radically larger samples runs into all sorts of barriers ranging from ethics concerns (for animal experiments) to funding. At the end of the day there's only so much you can learn from a sample size of 12. I'm not sure it's more ethical to have a bunch of wasted experiments with 12 mice each where you don't learn anything than to use 100 mice and actually have statistical power to identify something other than the hugest effect sizes.
  - elmolino89 5mo ago
    Lack of appropriate funding leads to cutting corners to the point that some results may not be worth the price of the paper to describe them. I had a passing experience with epigenetics. Even experiments with basically free of ethics issues cell lines could be screwed up by using single end, too short sequencing reads. Combined with too low coverage, less than perfect controls it gives the input data I which the state of the art peak callers will just throw the towel. So the "trick" is to use some way more forgiving peak caller and get a rather crappy results. Using the outdated human genome assembly (hg19), and old genome mapping programs just puts an extra cherry on the cake...
- waiquoo 5mo ago
  I'm in lab automation, we've come a long way from paper schedules (although those still get plenty of use :) )
gadders 5mo ago
Just read this review of his autobiography: https://www.atlassociety.org/post/what-shall-we-do-with-a-bumptious-sailor https://www.atlassociety.org/post/what-shall-we-do-with-a-bu... He seems like a complicated character, but like the article says “Quod licit Jovis, non licit bovis” (“What is permitted Jove is not permitted a cow.”).
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
shevy-java 5mo ago
This is (specifically) unfortunate - let me explain why. Some comments are critical of Craig; this may be understandable as he always liked having media focus on either his personality or on what he is/was doing. Craig was, in my opinion, mostly a business person first, scientist second, but I think he was also genuinely fascinated and interested in science. Others already brought the example of the human genome project (HGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project, although I remember it as HUGO - strange how Wikipedia uses another name for this. I can't say for certain whether my memory fails me, or Wikipedia seems to "forget". Anyway.). People also stated how the scientists back then got scared by Craig, aka "he will finish before we do, we are too slow", or "he will patent the ESTs and sell it, we must hurry up" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag). This was in the 1990s primarily, late 1990s. Now - I leave everyone to their thoughts here, but in my opinion, Craig kind of was like a destabilizer in a positive manner, in that he got scientists to focus more. Kind of like a shocker system in a defibrillator. A defibrillator isn't extremely enjoyable, but the use case is to try to get a halted heart to pulse again (in the ideal outcome). In some ways I think Craig kind of was like that for the larger scientific community. He became famous during the human genome research, even if media attention was also driven here, and lateron in synthetic biology (first synthetic cell) and some more. One can easily say that everything would have been done or discovered without Craig, that's fine, but in many ways he kind of also acted as an accelerator here. Today research-to-product is really quite rapid; in the 1990s my memory kind of says that we all were slower back then. And while those changes may all have come without Craig too, I think he kind of pushed others towards more effective speed too - perhaps not always positive, but in some cases I think Craig was acting as an accelerator. Which I think is not a net-negative per se. (Also, as for patenting information such as DNA - I am of course, as any logical person, absolutely against that, but the problem here is not Craig, the problem is that the USA has a completely broken patent system. For instance you can patent something but then forbid others from using it AND you yourself also don't use it. I fail to see how this benefits anyone, other than market control and market competition. That should be different. Many more things too, but this is not about the patent situation; it is about critisizing Craig for patents. Numerous others benefit from the patent situation, so why are these not critisized too?)
Tommix11 5mo ago
I attended a lecture of his once. One of the topics was emailing biological viruses. Svante Pääbo was there too.
lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
One of the few people who could give a TED Talk that wasn't complete BS. It actually had substance and some thought-provoking ideas.
t0mpr1c3 5mo ago
A world-class (and possibly universe-class) egotist who published the first diploid human genome sequence. It was his own DNA. He did not stop at broadcasting his achievement to a human audience: "Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth."
- kridsdale3 5mo ago
  I can't think of a better manifestation of the biological male imperitive.
crispyambulance 5mo ago
RIP. He was an amazing human. I worked for a time at JCVI when it was in Rockville, shortly after he had left Celera Genomics. He led a team that did something which was considered intractably difficult-- sequencing whole genomes. Then he did it again with global ocean sampling and synthetic genomics and other things. That is not to say that "he did it single-handedly", Venter was a hybrid of scientific and organizational talent that was able to make this stuff happen by coordinating stuff that's super hard to coordinate.
adi4213 5mo ago
Woah - I just drove by the JCV institute in La Jolla yesterday and felt thinking that the organization was really monumental to synthetic biology. Rest in peace
karp773 5mo ago
I read his autobiography. Besides the genome work, which undoutedly was of historical importance, one thing that impressed me the most, was how he slept on the surgery table in the opersting room after cleaning blood from it in Vietnam. Somehow it was safer than in the barracks. I was like wow, this guy definitely knew how to think outside the box!

342 points by rdl 5mo ago

Oh no! I did an internship at his lab when I went to UCSD. RIP.

rdl 5mo ago

He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.

dnautics 5mo ago
iiuc it was hamilton smith who insisted that shotgun sequencing would work. the nih side insisted on primer walking until celera started assembling the genome so rapidly that the nih had to get in on shotgun too
- acmj 5mo ago
  No, at initial release, the human genome from the NIH side was done by bac-to-bac, not by shotgun.
- elmolino89 5mo ago
  I belive you are mixing assembling the genome by combining sequences of individual, overlapping inserts of cosmids, fosmids, PACs and BACs (bacterial vectors with human DNA inserts of 40-150kbp) to whole genome shotgun. The inserts of the above bacterial vectors were sequenced using shotgun, but the gaps in the sequence were closed with custom primers.
echelon 5mo ago
> in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). I did a bio undergrad and one of my professors was involved. She was adamant that the Human Genome Project finished ahead of Celera and that the HGP published reference data that Venter and team fundamentally relied upon to even have their shotgun approach work.
- dnautics 5mo ago
  i worked for ham smith and my understanding through him is that both sides relied on data that the other produced. here are technical details, both were more or less independent, the celera sequence did include data from the other side as useful reference points but the assembly would have happened without it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123615/

apitman 5mo ago

Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.

dnautics 5mo ago
i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him
- jltsiren 5mo ago
  Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly. The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.
  - tootie 5mo ago
    I worked on this back in the 90s and there multiple data sets being used. We had one that was Mennonite family with like 5 living generations and 100ish individuals.
  - eweitz 5mo ago
    "RP11" is that man from Buffalo who comprises 74% of the human reference genome [1]. [1] https://undark.org/2024/07/09/informed-consent-human-genome-project/ https://undark.org/2024/07/09/informed-consent-human-genome-...
  - dekhn 5mo ago
    The majority of the genomic sequencing done by Celera for their initial released draft genome was on Venter's sample.
- moralestapia 5mo ago

alex1138 5mo ago

Sad news. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25jgPgmzk was interesting back in the day

koeng 5mo ago

I met Craig about a year ago or so at a synthetic biology conference. Even though his institute was the one which created the first synthetic cell, he pretty much just talked about how disappointing it was that we couldn't engineer the ribosome more. Was a funny memory :) guess you always want more once you do something great.

kingsleyopara 5mo ago

I went to a talk of his once and discovered that I also have aphantasia. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy the little I interacted with him. RIP

busterarm 5mo ago
I just read your comment and also just discovered that I have aphantasia. Edit: Doing more reading. Weird. I don't have problems with autobiographical memory or facial recognition. I'm totally dogshit at remembering peoples _names_ though but I'll recognize faces of people I've barely met for decades.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

jfengel 5mo ago

That's unexpected. He was only 80, and as I understand it still working. My his memory be a blessing.

jwilliams 5mo ago

Sad news. I met Craig very briefly at a conference probably a decade back. I pretty much was a self-study in genetics at the time... so let's just say I wasn't in Craig's league. Despite this he was very engaged and took the time for a very thoughtful chat.

timcobb 5mo ago

RIP Craig Venter. I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there. Thank you Craig Venter!

gwerbret 5mo ago

Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2]. 1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity 2: https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/ https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/

melling 5mo ago
It appears he had cancer and something about the treatment caused his death.

Aeroi 5mo ago

I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies. He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes. He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.

unsupp0rted 5mo ago
Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.
- cowsandmilk 5mo ago
  > Only 79… far from a complete human experience It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.
  - unsupp0rted 5mo ago
    Imagine what a guy like that could do with 79 more years... or 10x of that. It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do. It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.
    - unfitted2545 5mo ago
      A complete human experience is to have relatively little time, no point in doing anything if you have 500 years to do it IMO. Edit: Maybe there wouldn't be nilihism, but I don't think you could get more fulfilled with the extra time. I feel like an insect that lives 24 hours and a shark that lives several hundred have an equal feeling of accomplishment.

subtextminer 5mo ago

You can definitely say that ego was the fountainhead of progress for him!

TuringNYC 5mo ago

RIP. I absolutely loved the book A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter.

Imnimo 5mo ago

The bad boy of science!

LarsDu88 5mo ago

When I was a kid, I saw an interview with him on 60 minutes. He talked about how he had dropped out of college after letting go of his dreams of being an olympic swimmer. He then served as a medic in Vietnam, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a navy ship (but of course survived on account of being a near olympic class athlete. With a full head of hair). Later I saw him in real life give a talk at Cornell University with his old friend geneticist Andy Clark on the human genome. Dude was larger than life, tall, and bald. A few years later, I moved to San Diego, and got into surfing. Was reading a surfing website, and boom, Craig Venter pops up in an ad for luxury watches! Sailing in the ocean and rocking a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that was probably worth more than my grad stipend at the time.. A few years after that and I interviewed at one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics. The bioinformatics team had their heads spinning from the number of pivots the company had been doing. They had gone from biofuel production to working on genetically engineering pigs to produce kidneys that could be donated to humans. Lo and behold, within a few years, someone got the idea to actually work. Basically Venter and his accomplishments have been the background to my entire adult career in biology, genetics, bioinformatics and machine learning. RIP Craig Venter! Sometimes to get great science to happen you need larger than life personalities!

Aeroi 5mo ago
Great stories. I asked him about the pig thing, after he pivoted from biofuels (I think they raised $150m from Exxon). If I recall he teamed up with another infamous founder Martin, now Martine, Rothblatt who created SeriusXM and United Therapeutics.

PeterStuer 5mo ago

Great scientist, but Celera was the worst financial investment I ever made.

sqlcook 5mo ago

Sad news, I’ve worked at HumanLongevity and got to interact with Craig several times. He was a legend and truly will be missed.

E-Reverance 5mo ago

Interesting comment from him: " SPIEGEL: So you don't consider Collins to be a true scientist? Venter: Let's just say he's a government administrator. " https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/craig-venter-venting https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/craig-venter-venti...

__loam 5mo ago

A giant in biology. This is a real loss.

randogp 5mo ago

At the time they announced the full genome sequence I was an intern in molecular biology. We had a thermocycler in the lab and I had to book my slot on a paper agenda. I remember this portrait of him in front of multiple racks each plenty of thermocyclers. He taught me something about scale and he proved that sometimes it's worth looking at what you have and ask what if I could 200x this. In software this might seem obvious with GPU arrays etc.. but when you are trained in a wet lab and the instrument paper agenda, I wonder if we could have more breakthroughs in life sciences if we could use some bruteforce now and then. RIP

CrazyStat 5mo ago
I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big sample sizes should be, and trying to use radically larger samples runs into all sorts of barriers ranging from ethics concerns (for animal experiments) to funding. At the end of the day there's only so much you can learn from a sample size of 12. I'm not sure it's more ethical to have a bunch of wasted experiments with 12 mice each where you don't learn anything than to use 100 mice and actually have statistical power to identify something other than the hugest effect sizes.
- elmolino89 5mo ago
  Lack of appropriate funding leads to cutting corners to the point that some results may not be worth the price of the paper to describe them. I had a passing experience with epigenetics. Even experiments with basically free of ethics issues cell lines could be screwed up by using single end, too short sequencing reads. Combined with too low coverage, less than perfect controls it gives the input data I which the state of the art peak callers will just throw the towel. So the "trick" is to use some way more forgiving peak caller and get a rather crappy results. Using the outdated human genome assembly (hg19), and old genome mapping programs just puts an extra cherry on the cake...
waiquoo 5mo ago
I'm in lab automation, we've come a long way from paper schedules (although those still get plenty of use :) )

gadders 5mo ago

Just read this review of his autobiography: https://www.atlassociety.org/post/what-shall-we-do-with-a-bumptious-sailor https://www.atlassociety.org/post/what-shall-we-do-with-a-bu... He seems like a complicated character, but like the article says “Quod licit Jovis, non licit bovis” (“What is permitted Jove is not permitted a cow.”).

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

shevy-java 5mo ago

This is (specifically) unfortunate - let me explain why. Some comments are critical of Craig; this may be understandable as he always liked having media focus on either his personality or on what he is/was doing. Craig was, in my opinion, mostly a business person first, scientist second, but I think he was also genuinely fascinated and interested in science. Others already brought the example of the human genome project (HGP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project, although I remember it as HUGO - strange how Wikipedia uses another name for this. I can't say for certain whether my memory fails me, or Wikipedia seems to "forget". Anyway.). People also stated how the scientists back then got scared by Craig, aka "he will finish before we do, we are too slow", or "he will patent the ESTs and sell it, we must hurry up" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag). This was in the 1990s primarily, late 1990s. Now - I leave everyone to their thoughts here, but in my opinion, Craig kind of was like a destabilizer in a positive manner, in that he got scientists to focus more. Kind of like a shocker system in a defibrillator. A defibrillator isn't extremely enjoyable, but the use case is to try to get a halted heart to pulse again (in the ideal outcome). In some ways I think Craig kind of was like that for the larger scientific community. He became famous during the human genome research, even if media attention was also driven here, and lateron in synthetic biology (first synthetic cell) and some more. One can easily say that everything would have been done or discovered without Craig, that's fine, but in many ways he kind of also acted as an accelerator here. Today research-to-product is really quite rapid; in the 1990s my memory kind of says that we all were slower back then. And while those changes may all have come without Craig too, I think he kind of pushed others towards more effective speed too - perhaps not always positive, but in some cases I think Craig was acting as an accelerator. Which I think is not a net-negative per se. (Also, as for patenting information such as DNA - I am of course, as any logical person, absolutely against that, but the problem here is not Craig, the problem is that the USA has a completely broken patent system. For instance you can patent something but then forbid others from using it AND you yourself also don't use it. I fail to see how this benefits anyone, other than market control and market competition. That should be different. Many more things too, but this is not about the patent situation; it is about critisizing Craig for patents. Numerous others benefit from the patent situation, so why are these not critisized too?)

Tommix11 5mo ago

I attended a lecture of his once. One of the topics was emailing biological viruses. Svante Pääbo was there too.

lofaszvanitt 5mo ago

One of the few people who could give a TED Talk that wasn't complete BS. It actually had substance and some thought-provoking ideas.

t0mpr1c3 5mo ago

A world-class (and possibly universe-class) egotist who published the first diploid human genome sequence. It was his own DNA. He did not stop at broadcasting his achievement to a human audience: "Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth."

kridsdale3 5mo ago
I can't think of a better manifestation of the biological male imperitive.

crispyambulance 5mo ago

RIP. He was an amazing human. I worked for a time at JCVI when it was in Rockville, shortly after he had left Celera Genomics. He led a team that did something which was considered intractably difficult-- sequencing whole genomes. Then he did it again with global ocean sampling and synthetic genomics and other things. That is not to say that "he did it single-handedly", Venter was a hybrid of scientific and organizational talent that was able to make this stuff happen by coordinating stuff that's super hard to coordinate.

adi4213 5mo ago

Woah - I just drove by the JCV institute in La Jolla yesterday and felt thinking that the organization was really monumental to synthetic biology. Rest in peace

karp773 5mo ago

I read his autobiography. Besides the genome work, which undoutedly was of historical importance, one thing that impressed me the most, was how he slept on the surgery table in the opersting room after cleaning blood from it in Vietnam. Somehow it was safer than in the barracks. I was like wow, this guy definitely knew how to think outside the box!