Word: venter
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...early 1980s, Venter and Fraser were working on cell-surface receptors at the NIH. This was the dawn of the molecular revolution in biology, and the gene was emerging as the key. Finding genes was agonizingly slow work, however; scientists typically spent years locating and decoding a single...
...high-school graduate was ever more unlikely to succeed than Venter. He was a chronic discipline problem--even as a child he refused to take tests--and his parents despaired. In 1964, after being promoted out of high school, Venter moved from his San Francisco home to Southern California, where he dedicated himself to surfing, sailing and the life of a beach...
Those carefree days came to an abrupt end when Uncle Sam beckoned and Venter obliged by becoming a Navy hospital corpsman. By 1967, when he was just 21, he was in Vietnam, stationed at the Naval Hospital in Danang. Venter was the senior corpsman in the emergency room during the Tet offensive. For five days he worked around the clock to mend, save or just ease the pain of thousands of young men. Shortly after Tet, when physician Ronald Nadal met him, Venter was in trouble again, following an altercation with a senior officer whom Venter advised to perform...
...Venter decided he would become a doctor and work in the Third World. In a blazing six years, he finished his coursework, published a string of papers, was awarded his Ph.D. and found himself teaching med students. Along the way, he learned that his gifts lay less in medicine than in medical research. In the late '70s he met Fraser. They were married, and except for one brief professional separation have worked side by side ever since...
...Venter read a paper in the British science journal Nature describing a machine that could decode genes automatically. He flew to California and met with one of the machine's designers, Michael Hunkapiller. Within a few months, he had the first automated gene sequencer at the NIH. Within a year, the machine had decoded 100,000 letters in one region of a genome--fast, but not fast enough for Venter...