Personal Reflections on Craig Venter: Preface

Craig Venter's sudden passing has triggered many writings about his life and work.  I'm overdue on my own personal reflections, and am breaking them into three thematic pieces. While I only met him a few times and never one-on-one, his career had an enormous impact on mine. So I am going to write a series of posts this week reviewing, in a very personal way, Venter's enormous impact on genomics and synthetic biology. I'm sure I won't do it proper justice, and I won't be surprised if my memory plays tricks on me - please do point out any egregious errors of fact and feel free to contest my opinions if you feel they are unfounded.

I'm organizing the series around four major avenues of his work and how I perceived them. How my career was often shaped by his work, though I never engaged him in a one-on-one conversation.   I believe it was at my summer internship that I photocopied his original Expressed Sequence Tags publication in Science; his work on ESTs will be the focus of this piece.  Next came his groundbreaking work in the first bacterial genome sequences, which shook the field yet didn't completely change the way these projects were done elsewhere.  Then, his eukaryotic sequencing efforts, particularly human - a topic which I may break into multiple essays as there is so much to say.  Finally, his unparalleled work in synthetic biology, re-synthesizing a complete bacterial genome and then pursuing the reduction of it.  It is unfortunate at the time of his death that even in this greatly reduced genome, there are still genes whose function remains a mystery.

There are a number of themes I hope to develop in these; you the reader can be the judge of whether I succeed.  First, there was Venter's ability to go boldly. In particular, that the efforts he became famous for did not originate with him, but he was the one who executed them by noting that the time was ripe.  Second, that as interesting as what he did was, it was the reaction of the rest of the scientific community that is often even more interesting.  Third, he had an amazing ability to build extraordinarily talented teams and many of these individuals spent decades collaborating with him.

I hope you find this trip through the corners of my memory interesting and thought provoking.