American geneticist who raced—and to a politically brokered tie—against the public Human Genome Project. He died on April 29th 2026, aged 79.
A high-school slacker, he was drafted as a navy hospital corpsman during the Vietnam war and decided, after a near-suicide attempt off the coast of Da Nang, to do something meaningful with his life. He joined America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the fringe of the Human Genome Project, which began under James Watson's watchful eye in 1990. After a row over patenting his gene-tagging technique, he founded the Institute for Genomic Research and then Celera Genomics, a commercial outfit which used a new approach to DNA sequencing to race the official project. In June 2000 Bill Clinton declared the contest a tie at the White House, with Venter sharing the stage with the project's American director Francis Collins. Venter never won a Nobel prize; rivals including the late Sir John Sulston accused him of going "morally wrong" by seeking to monopolise the genome.
At Celera's height in early 2000 he was a centimillionaire. He later founded the J. Craig Venter Institute. His other achievements included the first synthetic bacterial genome and a stripped-down "minimal" genome. In 2013 he co-founded Human Longevity, and in January 2026 launched Diploid Genomics, a final effort to extend human lifespans. His second wife was the microbiologist Claire Fraser. He named both of his yachts Sorcerer; Sorcerer II was fitted out to sample DNA from ocean water on transoceanic cruises, in the spirit of HMS Beagle and HMS Challenger.
Sic transit gloria Monday!