Word: venter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...while scientific diplomacy required that Venter and Collins get equal recognition for this epochal achievement, insiders knew that, to paraphrase George Orwell, one man was more equal than the other. The genome would certainly have been sequenced if Craig Venter had never been born. But if he hadn't decided to attack the problem with a radical approach, using the most sophisticated computer technology available, and to drive the effort with the full force of his rebellious personality, it would have taken years longer to complete. By forcing Collins and his colleagues to double and redouble the pace of their...
Beyond that, their equal billing at last summer's announcement belied the fact that Venter's version of the genome was more complete than Collins'. Venter's contribution, asserts Victor McKusick, the Johns Hopkins researcher who is considered the grandfather of medical genetics, was "spectacular...
...followers of the genome saga know, Venter's restless intellect and his tendency to buck authority were evident from the start. After barely graduating from high school in the 1960s, for example, he headed not for college but for the surfing beaches of Southern California. That made him a prime target for the draft, and the Navy sent him to Vietnam as a medical corpsman--an experience that taught him indelible lessons about the fragility of human life and the colossal ineptitude of big bureaucracies. Says Venter: "If you suffered fools, you died. I dealt with thousands of people dying...
Never one to keep his opinions quiet, Venter did two stints in the brig for refusing to follow orders. When he returned to the U.S., his laid-back surfer-boy mentality was gone. He signed up at the University of California, San Diego, and emerged six years later with a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology. Within a few years, he landed at the National Institutes of Health, where he began trying to locate and decode a gene that governs production of a brain-cell protein. The work was agonizingly slow, and when he heard about a computerized machine that used...
...that purchase became a symbol of Venter's disdain for authority, the new technique he developed for finding genes with it demonstrated his brilliance. By focusing on those bits of DNA that were actually doing something--as opposed to the long strings that had no obvious function--he was able to tag the relevant parts and decode them. These "expressed-sequence tags" enabled Venter to start identifying genes at a hitherto unimaginable pace...