Robin McKie
If there is a gene for causing uproar, Craig Venter has it. More importantly, he is also the man most likely to isolate it.
In the predatory world of advanced biotechnology, Venter — head of the Institute of Genomics Research in Maryland – is regarded as a deadly member of a breed of research raptors who hunt genes for cash.
The point was underlined last week when he announced plans to unravel the entire human genetic code. He revealed he had vast private funding to beat the publicly backed international Human Genome Project, which aims to achieve the same goal by 2005. He hopes to beat them by four years, and to patent the most promising genes.
“In less than a decade, he has sprinted from respectful obscurity … to become perhaps the most productive biologist in the world,” states the journal Discover. “He has also kindled the ire, resentment and grudging respect of the scientific elite, and, in the end, set the pace for how life will be studied in the 21st century.”
Not bad for a lad who just managed to graduate from a San Francisco high school, before moving to Newport Beach, near Los Angeles, where he worked at night so he could surf by day.
Then came the Vietnam War. Venter was drafted to work in Da Nang. Among the hundreds of mutilated bodies two cases had a profound effect on him .
One was a child slain by a bullet smaller than a .22. Its course through the child’s brain left hardly a trace, and caused no obvious damage. Later, a soldier was brought in. His intestines were destroyed by a mortar blast, and he was given less than 12 hours to live. He survived for weeks.
“I started asking myself big, naive questions,” Venter told Discover. “What is life? What makes it work?”
He decided to study biochemistry at the University of California, gaining his BA and PhD in six years. He moved to the United States National Institute of Health – and into controversy.
Venter helped to isolate DNA known to have a role in making proteins in the brain. His reputation grew. Then, in 1991, he tried to patent his discoveries.
Geneticist and Nobel laureate James Watson denounced his actions as “sheer lunacy”, and researchers vilified him. As they pointed out, he did not know what his genes did, and could not claim they might have medical use. He had to withdraw his applications, and was shunned by fellow researchers.
But business entrepreneurs pestered him with offers. He accepted $70-million from the late venture capitalist Wallace Steinberg and used it in 1992 to set up the Institute of Genomics Research.
The institute has become one of the world’s leading research centres, guided by his old love of surfing. “Surfers learn to look as many as 10 waves back. They select which one to ride long before it is on top of them.”
Venter certainly picks his waves. In 1995 he announced his institute had deciphered the first full genome of a living organism, a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae, and followed this with similar successes with other bugs. He also reported details of the structures of thousands of human genes discovered by his researchers.
Venter claims the research is done as a public service. The results are published on the Web. But cynics point out that results are not published until they have been scrutinised by Venter’s corporate partners.
Now the former surfer has accepted the backing of pharmaceutical giant Perkin-Elmer to unravel all the three billion DNA components that make up the human genetic blueprint. The most useful will be patented and used to make medicines – and profits for Perkin-Elmer. If he succeeds, Venter will be handsomely rewarded.
He will also be revenged upon his former persecutors – by going down in history as the man who cracked the human genome.