Word: venter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...real answer is that Venter thumbs his nose at the system and the scientific establishment. He scorns the feigned modesty that most scientists wear as comfortably as their lab coats and tweed jackets. He loves to buck authority (in the Navy in Vietnam he was tossed in the brig twice for refusing to obey orders), and he almost always speaks his mind. "He has no filter. He shoots from the hip," says Norton Zinder of Rockefeller University, leader of the effort to map the genome who overcame his initial hostility and joined Celera's advisory board...
...does Venter subscribe to the traditional belief that true scientists must take a vow of poverty. When he left the National Institutes of Health to begin his great gene chase, he turned almost overnight from a hardscrabble government scientist with $2,000 in the bank into a yacht- and sports car-owning multimillionaire who threw Gatsby-like parties (last year's income: $560,000, not counting options on Celera stock that were worth, at last week's closing price of $125.25, nearly $351 million). And by declaring his intention to sequence the entire human genome in only a fraction...
Then there are the complaints about the quality of his work. Collins once said that Venter's map would read like Cliffs Notes or Mad magazine. Others call him a cheat for lifting data made public on the government's GenBank website www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov at taxpayers' expense--and then patenting sequences culled from this data, thereby locking up information originally intended to be freely available. (Ironically, Celera suffered a setback when some of the government data turned out to be contaminated with nonhuman sequences...
...face of such attacks, Venter remains serenely optimistic. "Imagine the infinitesimally small odds of ending up in such a privileged position," he tells a visitor to his airy, press-clipping-decorated office at Celera's Rockville, Md., headquarters, just a Metro ride away from his NIH rivals, "of making these discoveries and trying to help guide and impact medicine." Sure, he admits, the criticism "gets painful at times," but, he adds, "I wouldn't trade what I'm doing for anything...
Despite some accounts likening his accomplishment to finding biology's Holy Grail, Venter points out that identifying the order of the letters in our genetic alphabet is just a first step. Still ahead for Celera as well as its competitors: the much more complicated task of telling what those letters mean, what they do and what can be done if the messages they spell out are in error--a prime cause of human disease and suffering (see following story...