Biography of John Craig Venter

John Craig Venter is an American biologist who is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and the first to transfect a cell with a synthetic genome.

Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on October 14, 1946. He did not take school as seriously as he should have when he was younger. Venter was drafted and enlisted in the United States Navy where he worked in the ICU of a field hospital. While in Vietnam, he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind after more than a mile out. Being around wounded and dying soldiers on a daily basis made him want to study medicine. He later switched to biomedical research. Venter began his formal education after a tour of duty as a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He began his college career at a community college in California. While at the National Institution of Health, Venter learned of a technique for rapidly identifying all of the mRNAs in a cell and began to use it to identify human brain genes. Venter believed that shotgun sequencing was the fastest and most effective way to get useful human genome data. The method was controversial because some geneticists felt it would not be accurate enough for a genome as complicated as human’s. Frustrated, Venter looked for funding from the private sector to fund Celera Genomics. He founded Celera Genomics with the goal of the company being to sequence the entire human genome and release it to the public for non-commercial use in much less time and for much less cost than the public human genome project. The goal consequently put pressure on the public genome program and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence. DNA from five demographically different individual...

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...er of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units. Many researchers before had assumed all the units were equal. Chargaff was able to complete test this using newly developed paper chromatography and an ultraviolet spectrophotometer. Without Chargaff, we wouldn’t know almost anything about DNA because he discovered that DNA was found in pairs and certain units paired up with each other.

These three scientists discovered different findings involving genetics. Without Avery or Chargaff, Venter probably wouldn’t even know what a DNA sequence was made up of let alone being able to sequence it completely. Avery and Chargaff did a good job with their findings with the technology they had at the time. Avery could have done another in-depth experiment with what he found out from his first experiment.