Word: venter
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...seem as if J. Craig Venter is on an extended vacation as he sails his 95-ft. luxury yacht on a 25,000-mile voyage around the world. But the iconoclastic scientist who took on a consortium of national governments in a race to map the human genome--and fought them to a photo finish five years ago--is actually hard at work. He's prospecting--not for gold but for DNA, applying the same techniques developed to decode human genes to the genes of microbes scooped from the ocean and out of the air. On a pilot voyage, through...
When President Bill Clinton hosted an event at the White House four years ago to celebrate the end of the race to decode human DNA, the headlines belonged to the leaders of the two competing teams: J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins. But everyone in the room knew that the unheralded star of the race was the big teddy bear of a man sitting in the fourth...
...Eric Lander, while working for Collins in the tortoise-paced Human Genome Project, who saw that his team was losing and made it his business to beat Venter's harelike private venture at its own game. With $34 million from the Genome Project and a $38 million loan from M.I.T.'s Whitehead Institute, Lander ordered dozens of special-purpose computers and state-of-the-art capillary machines and built a huge automated gene-sequencing pipeline so insatiable that he was soon grabbing long stretches of DNA from other labs to feed its monstrous appetite. It was his lab's work...
Details had already been circulated to journalists under embargo. But Venter, by speaking to a reporter at a biotechnology conference in France on Feb. 9, had effectively broken the embargo. Not for the first time in the increasingly bitter rivalry over the genome project, Venter's version of the story would hit the headlines before his rivals'. "We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right," Venter told the Observer. "The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical...
...truth, the number of human genes changed nothing. Venter's remarks concealed two whopping nonsequiturs: that fewer genes implied more environmental influences and that 30,000 genes were too few to explain human nature, whereas 100,000 would have been enough. As one scientist put it to me a few weeks later, just 33 genes, each coming in two varieties (on or off), would be enough to make every human being in the world unique. There are more than 10 billion combinations that could come from flipping a coin 33 times, so 30,000 does not seem such a small...