Word: venter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...increasingly unhappy within NIH, with its bureaucracy, limited funds and intramural sniping (Watson, Collins' predecessor as head of the agency's genome project, had derided Venter for his work on machines that "could be run by monkeys"). So he and Claire Fraser, his wife and collaborator, left to found a private research firm, called the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where in 1994 he upped the gene-sequencing ante to a new level. At the urging of medicine Nobelist Hamilton Smith, now a Celera scientist, Venter decided to use a technique called shotgunning to sequence the entire genome...
...then, in 1998, Venter took his most audacious gamble. Armed with a more powerful set of gene-sequencing machines and heading a new company called Celera Genomics, he boldly declared that he was going after the biggest prize of all--the human genome. Not only would he sequence the whole thing, but he'd also do it by 2001, several years before the expected completion of the official Human Genome Project. While he insisted he'd make his genome map public, Venter said he'd sell proprietary analytical software to plumb it for information...
That arrogant challenge, coupled with Venter's high-flying profile on Wall Street, where his company was publicly traded, didn't sit well with Collins, by now the project's unofficial leader. Collins claimed at one point that Venter's genome map would be so incomplete and full of errors it would read like Mad magazine. Not to be bested in a war of words, Venter called the genome project's directors the "liars' club...
Eventually, even his bitterest critics had to face the fact that Venter had not been dealing in hype. And, in the end, the genome project was forced to adopt some of Venter's ideas to avoid being left behind. "It was," admits Watson, "the correct way to go." Thanks to Venter's maverick ways, says Phillip Sharp, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "we have the human genome four years early, and it's spectacular. Craig is to be applauded for doing this...
Although the details will take decades to unravel, the genetic evidence is coming in at a remarkable pace. In the months since Venter and Collins stood together at the White House last June, Celera scientists have rushed ahead and sequenced the genome of the mouse. Astonishingly, mouse and human genomes are almost identical, with only a few hundred genes separating...