Word: venter
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...however, Venter had brainstormed a way to automate the process, pulling in supercomputers to do the work of recording each letter in all the necessary snippets of DNA and then knitting the fragments together in a simple and predictable way. If a page of text from a book were torn into pieces, it could be easily reconstructed as long as the tears were made at predetermined places - always before the word only, for example, whenever it appeared on the same page as the word and. Venter's system worked in a similar way, and in 1998 he brashly predicted that...
...energized as he was by the work, the ambitious and freethinking Venter chafed at what he calls the "bureaucratic hell" there and longed for the opportunity to test the innovative ideas he had for transforming the emerging field of genetics. In 1992 he secured private funding and created his own company, the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville. Within three years he completed the first-ever genome sequencing of an entire organism-Haemophilus influenzae, the bacterium that causes meningitis. The firm soon became a go-to place for sequencing projects, and it wasn't long before Venter hungered...
...ensure he'd have the resources to make good on that boast, Venter joined hands with global technology giant Perkin-Elmer, forming a new company called Celera, which took its name from the middle of the word accelerate. The Celera-backed Venter and the NIH-backed Collins briefly explored collaborating, but those efforts fell through, and over the next two years the two camps worked feverishly, occasionally volleying in the press over whose method was better or whose intentions were purer. Collins sniffed at Venter's plans to create a genome database whose basic map he would make available...
...Venter delivered on his promise, finishing just ahead of Collins, but a government official who knew both men, hoping to quiet the feuding, brokered a truce between the groups, which included the sweetener of a joint announcement at the White House in 2000. President Bill Clinton lauded the completed genome as "the most important, most wondrous map ever produced...
...high times did not last long. Back at Celera, the competing interests of a free public database and a corporation's stockholders proved hard to reconcile, and just two years after the White House ceremony, Venter was fired by the board. For solace, he decided to get away. Still a sailing enthusiast, he hit on a grand plan to mimic the journey of the H.M.S. Challenger, the vessel that in the 1870s conducted the first global mission to sample life from the oceans of the world. Venter would circumnavigate the globe with a crew of scientists and sailors and every...