Craig Venter

John Craig Venter (October 14, 1946 – April 29, 2026) was an American geneticist and businessman. He is known for having led one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and led the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc., and Synthetic Genomics.

Venter was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 lists of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed him as 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In 2012, Venter was honored with the Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. He was a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.

John Craig Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 14, 1946, the son of Elisabeth and John Venter. His family moved to Millbrae, California, during his childhood. In his youth, he did not take his education seriously, preferring to spend his time on the water in boats or surfing. According to his autobiography, A Life Decoded, he was never a highly engaged student, having Cs and Ds on his eighth-grade report cards.

Venter considered that his behavior in his adolescence was indicative of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and later found ADHD-linked genetic variants in his own DNA. He graduated from Mills High School. His father died suddenly at age 59 from cardiac arrest, giving him a lifelong awareness of his own mortality. He quoted a saying: "If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life."

He opposed the Vietnam War, but enlisted in the United States Navy to avoid being drafted. He trained as a medic and worked as a hospital corpsman in the intensive-care ward of a field hospital at Naval Support Activity Danang in Vietnam for a year in 1967–68. Stressed by the intensity of the Tet Offensive, he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but came to his senses and swam back to shore. Treating thousands of injured soldiers instilled in him a desire to study medicine.

He began his college education in 1969 at a community college, College of San Mateo in California, and later transferred to the University of California, San Diego, where he studied under biochemist Nathan O. Kaplan. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry in 1972 and a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology in 1975 from UCSD.

After working as an associate professor, and later as full professor, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1984.

Venter was passionate about the power of genomics to transform healthcare radically. Venter believed that whole genome shotgun sequencing was the fastest and most effective way to get useful human genome data. However, the method was rejected by the Human Genome Project, since some geneticists felt it would not be accurate enough for a genome as complicated as that of humans, that it would be logistically more difficult, and that it would cost significantly more.

He viewed the slow pace of progress in the Human Genome Project as an opportunity to continue his interest in trying his shotgun sequencing method to speed up human genome sequencing, so he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee. The goal consequently put pressure on the public genome program and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence. Venter's effort won him renown as he and his team at Celera Corporation shared credit for sequencing the first draft human genome with the publicly funded Human Genome Project.

In 2000, Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Public Genome Project jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome, a full three years ahead of the expected end of the Public Genome Program. The announcement was made along with U.S. President Bill Clinton, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.

On February 15, 2001, the Human Genome Project consortium published the first Human Genome in the journal Nature, followed one day later by a Celera publication in Science. Despite some claims that shotgun sequencing was in some ways less accurate than the clone-by-clone method chosen by the Human Genome Project, the technique became widely accepted by the scientific community.

Venter was the author of three books, the first of which is an autobiography titled A Life Decoded. In Venter's second book, Life at the Speed of Light, he announced his theory that this is the generation in which there appears to be a dovetailing of the two previously diverse fields of science represented by computer programming and the genetic programming of life by DNA sequencing. He was applauded for his position on this by futurist Ray Kurzweil. Venter's most recent book, co-authored by David Ewing Duncan, The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean's Microbiome, details the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition, spanning a 15-year period during which microbes from the world's oceans were collected and their DNA sequenced.

Venter was married to Barbara Rae-Venter for 12 years. They had a son together, Christopher. He then married Claire M. Fraser and remained married to her until 2005. In late 2008, he married Heather Kowalski, and they lived in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California. Venter was an atheist.

Venter was 75 when he sold his main research building to UCSD in 2022 for $25 million. The institute had outgrown the space and, in May 2025, it was announced that it would be moving to a new facility in downtown San Diego. The Venter Institute campus in Rockville, Maryland, also expanded. In 2022 he said he had no intention of retiring. Besides his home in La Jolla, he had a ranch in Borrego Springs, California, as well as homes in two small towns in Maine. He participated in sailing and flying a Cirrus SR22T plane, which he called "the ultimate freedom".

Venter is considered by his peers to have been a pioneer and maverick of genetic sequencing. He is credited with the shotgun sequencing method that has since helped reduce the time and cost for sequencing. By entering the Human Genome Project at a late stage yet pushing forward quickly with his commercial ties, Venter helped to bring the Project to public attention and make the results of the Project freely available to expand medical research. Venter is also considered a forerunner in the field of synthetic biology with the work he did at his institute.

Venter has been the subject of articles in several magazines, including Wired, The Economist, Australian science magazine Cosmos, and The Atlantic. Venter and his work were part of the focus of the 2001 NOVA special, "Cracking the code of life". Venter was featured in Time magazine's "The Top 10 Everything of 2008" article. Number three in 2008's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries was a piece outlining his work stitching together the 582,000 base pairs necessary to invent the genetic information for a whole new bacterium.

1996: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement

2000: Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine

2001: Biotechnology Heritage Award with Francis Collins, from the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Venter authored over 200 publications in scientific journals.