Word: venter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Freed from the confines of the NIH, Venter took an offer from a venture capitalist to head his own research facility, which he named The Institute for Genomic Research--TIGR, or "tiger." The private sector gave him the resources to find genes as fast as he could...
...Johns Hopkins Nobelist Hamilton Smith challenged Venter to do more. At the time, Venter was using a technique called shotgunning. In essence, shotgunning amounts to putting DNA into a chemical Cuisinart. High-frequency sound waves shred the long stringy molecule into tiny fragments. The fragments are cloned in bacteria, and then, following what has become standard gene-mapping procedure, the bugs are ripped open and their DNA is run through a gene-sequencing machine...
...torn into so many random bits of genetic gibberish (as opposed to the predictable fragments made by gene-cutting enzymes), scientists need powerful computers to determine where the tiny fragments overlap. This is tough enough when you're sequencing a small part of a chromosome. But now Smith urged Venter to try it out, not merely on a strip of DNA but on an entire genome. He proposed Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections and meningitis. Until then, only a few small viruses, whose genomes had tens of thousands of genetic letters, had been entirely decoded...
...audacious proposal was quickly denied federal funding. Venter and Smith pushed ahead anyway--and within a year they had succeeded. The publication of their 1995 paper in Science was a landmark that galvanized researchers. For the first time, the genetic secrets of an entire living organism had been exposed...
...December scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and at the Sanger Centre passed a new milestone by decoding the first animal genome, that of a tiny roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans. At 97 million letters, C. elegans' genome is by far the most sophisticated ever sequenced. But if Venter's newly formed Celera (derived from the word celerity, which means swiftness) can pull it off, his proposal to shotgun the entire 3 billion-letter human genome in three years will make the roundworm's DNA look downright puny...