Word: venter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Listening to Venter explain all this in his soft California voice, you hear a 53-year-old child of the '60s, not the ogre portrayed by his enemies. He is one of four children of an excommunicated Mormon accountant ("He broke too many rules--coffee, drinking, smoking," says the son, conscious of his father's death at 59) and grew up in the San Francisco suburb of Millbrae. In high school he swam competitively but didn't study. After graduating--barely--he moved down to Newport Beach to surf. But he had smarts. As a draft-eligible nonstudent, he says...
Within a year, Venter had decoded 100,000 letters (the human genome has some 3.1 billion, spelling out some 50,000 different genes, at the best guess). They were hieroglyphics to him, but not, he knew, to living cells, which recognize active genes and spin off single strands of RNA that mirror the DNA's coding. So Venter collected the new RNA, inserting it into bacterial cells and letting them clone junk-free complementary DNA, or cDNA, matching the original genes. His automatic sequencer could then read the letters of these genetic instructions...
...Watson, then head of NIH's part of the Human Genome Project (another part is under the Department of Energy), denounced the move as "sheer lunacy" that would cause paralyzing legal battles. When the dust settled, NIH had withdrawn its patent proposal, Watson had quit the genome project, and Venter and Fraser, a former graduate student at Buffalo whom he had married after splitting with his first wife, were off running their own center, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), in nearby Gaithersburg...
With $70 million in long-term funding from the late biotech entrepreneur Wallace Steinberg, TIGR (pronounced tiger) finally gave Venter freedom to do what he wanted. But there was a hitch. First crack at any genes it decoded went to the nonprofit institute's commercial partner, Human Genome Sciences, led by former AIDS researcher William Haseltine...
Until then, Venter had been randomly sampling and sequencing small bits of cDNA. But one of his new recruits, Hamilton Smith, a Nobelist from Johns Hopkins', proposed a bolder approach: "shotgunning" the entire genome of an organism. The idea was dramatically simple. Using an ordinary kitchen blender, they would shatter the organism's DNA into millions of small fragments, run them through the sequencers (which can read 500 letters at a time), then reassemble them into the full genome using a high-speed computer and novel software written by in-house computer whiz Granger Sutton. By contrast, the HGP divided...