The maverick scientist Craig Venter was dubbed Darth Venter for wanting to
charge the human race a fortune to read its own genetic code. Now the
balding Vietnam veteran has another cunning plan: to get exclusive rights to
the bare essentials of life and create green fuels that will make him a
dollar trillionaire.
Venter, a former school drop-out with an IQ of 142, was vilified by the
scientific establishment for taking them on in a race to sequence the human
genome – the biochemical instruction manual for homo sapiens. The result in
2000 was a dead heat between the publicly funded Human Genome Project, which
was battling to release the knowledge free of charge, and Venter with his
scheme to sell the patented findings.
A man of supreme immodesty, the 60-year-old American relished the controversy,
flashing his Learjet, yacht and Rolex, his Hollywood-style interviews and
his ability to raise $1 billion on the New York stock market in a single
day. Immune to insults deriding him as “Hitler”, “a self-aggrandising pain
in the arse” and “an opportunistic maniac”, he proclaimed: “Is my science of
the level consistent with other people who have gotten the Nobel? Yes.”
Although Venter had become arguably the best-known molecular biologist after
Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the DNA double helix, his proposed
money-spinner was dead in the water and his firm sacked him. In the
cartoon-book tradition of egocentric scientists, Venter railed against the
“morons” who had failed to understand his vision. He began to hatch another
fiendish scheme for world dominance.
This one is a real cracker. Researchers at his nonprofit J Craig Venter
Institute in Rockville, Maryland, have laboured hard in search of biology’s
holy grail – a way of creating synthetic bacteria that would produce
environmentally friendly fuels as natural waste products. Their first
breakthrough, announced last month, was discovering the absolute minimum of
genes necessary for a simple microbe to function.
Last week Venter’s team stunned the scientific world by revealing that with
this knowledge they had carried out a “species transplant” that replaced the
entire genetic code of one bacterium with another. Now the inventor plans to
design new codes on computers to programme synthetic microbes to produce
fuel from sunlight.
Fears have been raised about the dangers of tinkering with life and releasing
malignant bugs. “We don’t yet know what are the social, ethical and even
bio-weapons implications of this research,” said Hope Shand of the ETC
technology pressure group. The most ominous note was struck by a scientist
at MIT: “The genetic code is 3.6 billion years old. It’s time for a
rewrite.” Venter claims the project was interrupted for 18 months while a
bioethics panel was reconvened to review it.
Not everyone thinks Venter is an evil monopolist. “I found him to be a
personable, chubby, middle-aged bloke who was quite open,” said one
interviewer. “He’s a good scientist, but a maverick. It was his misfortune
to cross swords with some of the most powerful scientific institutions,
which closed ranks and sent him to Coventry.” He also tells bad jokes.
If Venter’s wheeze pans out he will be laughing all the way to the bank.
“Obviously, if we made an organism that produced fuel, that could be the
first billion or trillion-dollar organism,” he told Newsweek. These
organisms, he predicted, will “replace the petrochemical industry, most
food, clean energy and bio-remedication”. Synthetic Genomics, a start-up
company in which he has invested heavily, should be producing “within the
decade”, he said last week.
It’s not the only realm where Venter is making waves. In a project he compares
with the voyages of Charles Darwin, his yacht Sorcerer II has been roaming
the seas collecting microbes that he envisages will lead to vast colonies of
bacteria scrubbing the atmosphere of greenhouse gases. In the Sargasso Sea
alone, he and his team discovered 1.2m new genes – double the number
previously known. Environmental groups spoilt this achievement by accusing
him of stealing Bermuda’s microbes.
He has also taken a voyage around himself by mapping his own DNA. The results
are changing what he eats and the way he lives. After discovering he has an
above-average risk of a heart attack, he adopted a healthier start to the
day with a high-fibre, low-fat diet. The upside is that he is not vulnerable
to mad cow disease, allowing him a steak in the evening.
Venter was born into a military family in Millbrae, California, a middle-class
suburb near San Francisco airport. His parents had met in the Marines in
1943 and were not enchanted by his unruly habits of chasing planes on his
bike and getting into trouble at the expense of his studies. A champion
swimmer and a lothario, he was threatened by one girlfriend’s gun-toting
father who told him to leave his daughter alone.
He dropped out of high school and by the age of 18 he was a surfer and beach
bum, living in his grandmother’s garage. In 1967 he was called up to serve
in Vietnam as a medic. Arriving in time for the communist Vietcong’s Tet
offensive against US bases, he spent six months sorting the quick from the
dead at the navy hospital in Da Nang.
“I had to learn in real time what triage actually meant,” he recalled. “I
dealt with the death of thousands of men my age. It was a life-altering
experience. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.”
He returned to the US with a Vietnamese wife, determined to get a medical
degree. In just five years he earned his BA and PhD at the University of
California medical school in San Diego. With a failing marriage and a young
son, he shifted into medical research and began teaching at the state
university of New York, where he met his future wife and collaborator,
Claire Fraser.
He first grasped the importance of decoding genes at the government-funded US
National Institutes of Health, which he joined in 1984. Frustrated by the
slow progress and contemptuous of his peers, in a blinding revelation he
realised it was unnecessary to trawl the entire genome to find the active
parts. He switched his attention from the DNA blueprint to the messenger
molecules (RNA) that a cell makes from the blueprint.
The breakthrough enabled him to sequence genes with unprecedented speed. His
success, though remarkable to some, did not impress Watson, the father of
DNA research, who dismissed the result as work “that could be run by
monkeys”. The criticism and lack of funding prompted Venter to set up a
private research body, the Institute for Genomic Research in 1992. Three
years later he astonished scientists by unveiling the first genome of a
free-living organism, Haemophilus influenzae, a major cause of childhood ear
infections and meningitis.
It was in May 1998 that Venter had dropped his bombshell: he announced the
formation of a commercial company, Celera Genomics, to crack the entire
human genetic code in just three years. At that stage the public Human
Genome Project was three years into a rather leisurely 10-year programme,
scheduled to end in 2003.
The race soon became a battleground of dirty tactics, vicious bureaucratic
in-fighting and black propaganda. It was also a personal tussle between the
flamboyant Venter and the understated British academic (now Sir) John
Sulston of the Wellcome Trust, a leading figure in the largely US-funded
Human Genome Project.
Sulston was scathing about his rival: “If global capitalism gets complete
control of the human genome, that is very bad news indeed. I do not believe
it should be under the control of one person. But that is what Celera are
trying to do as far as they can. Craig had gone morally wrong.”
Venter’s ripostes betrayed a hint of paranoia: “I have been a thorn in their
side for some time because I keep coming up with breakthroughs. Having a
rival in any sense is unacceptable to them. They are trying to destroy
someone they view as a serious competitor.”
On June 26, 2000, presided over by President Bill Clinton, both sides presented
their draft results. Few people went to Venter’s celebration party. “It was
held in a huge venue that was virtually empty,” recalled a journalist who
did attend.
The synthetic biology that Venter is pioneering springs from an attitude that
scientists are building machines, not living things. These are seen as
computers capable of replicating themselves, with genes as software
controlling hardware cells – a view that dates from Watson’s and Crick’s
discoveries in 1953. But Venter is taking the process to a new level by
creating new hardware and software where none existed.
The question is, who will benefit most – Venter or mankind?
