Mr Craig Venter

[Guest guest]

Issue 12.08 - August 2004

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Craig Venter's Epic Voyage to Redefine the Origin of the Species

He wanted to play God, so he cracked the human genome. Now he wants

to play Darwin and collect the DNA of everything on the planet.

By ShreevePage 1 of 10 next »

Feature:

Craig Venter's Epic Voyage

Plus:

How to Hunt Microbes

Picture this: You are standing at the edge of a lagoon on a South

Pacific island. The nearest village is 20 miles away, reachable only

by boat. The water is as clear as air. Overhead, white fairy terns

hover and peep among the coconut trees. Perhaps 100 yards away, you

see a man strolling in the shallows. He is bald, bearded, and buck

naked. He stoops every once in a while to pick up a shell or examine

something in the sand.

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A lot of people wonder what happened to J. Craig Venter, the maverick

biologist who a few years ago raced the US government to sequence the

human genetic code. Well, you've found him. His pate is sunburned,

and the beard is new since he graced the covers of Time and

BusinessWeek. It makes him look younger and more relaxed - not that I

ever saw him looking very tense, even when the genome race got ugly

and his enemies were closing in. This afternoon, the only adversary

he has to contend with is the occasional no-see-um nipping at some

tender body part. " Nobody out here has ever heard of the human

genome, " he told me a week ago, when I first joined him in French

Polynesia. " It's great. "

Venter is here not just to enjoy himself, though he has been doing

plenty of that. What separates him from your average 58-year-old nude

beachcomber is that he's in the midst of a scientific enterprise as

ambitious as anything he's ever done. Leaving colleagues and rivals

to comb through the finished human code in search of individual

genes, he has decided to sequence the genome of Mother Earth.

What we think of as life on this planet is only the surface layer of

a vast undiscovered world. The great majority of Earth's species are

bacteria and other microorganisms. They form the bottom of the food

chain and orchestrate the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and other

nutrients through the ecosystem. They are the dark matter of life.

They may also hold the key to generating a near-infinite amount of

energy, developing powerful pharmaceuticals, and cleaning up the

ecological messes our species has made. But we don't really know what

they can do, because we don't even know what they are.

Venter wants to change that. He's circling the globe in his luxury

yacht the Sorcerer II on an expedition that updates the great

scientific voyages of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably

Darwin's journey aboard HMS Beagle. But instead of bagging his finds

in bottles and gunnysacks, Venter is capturing their DNA on filter

paper and shipping it to be sequenced and analyzed at his

headquarters in Rockville, land. The hope is to uncover tens or

even hundreds of millions of new genes, an immense bolus of

information on Earth's biodiversity. In the process, he's having a

hell of a good time and getting a very good tan. " We're talking about

an unknown world of enormous importance, " says Harvard biologist and

writer E. O. , who serves on the scientific advisory board of

the Sorcerer II expedition. " Venter is one of the first to get

serious about exploring that world in its totality. This is a guy who

thinks big and acts accordingly. "

He certainly talks big. " We will be able to extrapolate about all

life from this survey, " Venter says. " This will put everything Darwin

missed into context. "

For now, though, the expedition has run aground, snagged on an

unanticipated political reef here in French-controlled waters. But it

may all work out tomorrow. Right now, the sun is just beginning to

soften toward sunset, and a gentle breeze is rustling the palms.

Venter has disappeared in the direction of the boat, and one of his

crew members, wearing a Sorcerer II T-shirt over her bathing suit, is

waving me back. Must be close to dinnertime.

The last time I spent a few days with Venter on his yacht was in 2002

on St. Barts. He was in a much darker mood. He had just been fired as

head of Celera Genomics and was hiding out in the Caribbean, licking

his wounds. He had started the company four years before to prove

that a technique called whole-genome shotgun sequencing could

determine the identity and order of all DNA code in a human cell and

do it much faster than the conventional method favored by the

government-funded Human Genome Project. He had already made science

history by using his technique to uncover the first genome of a

bacterium, but most people doubted it would work on something as

large and complicated as a human being. Undaunted, he pushed ahead,

informing the leaders of the government program that they should just

leave the human genome to him and sequence the mouse instead.

Venter also promised that he would give away the basic human code for

free. Celera would make money by selling access to gobs of additional

genomic information and the powerful bioinformatics software tools

needed to interpret it. His critics claimed that he was trying to

have it both ways, taking credit for providing the world with the

code to human life and reaping profits for his shareholders at the

same time. Venter cheerfully agreed.

Things didn't quite go according to plan. His gambit did indeed

accelerate the pace of human DNA sequencing, and the shotgun approach

has now become the standard method of decoding genomes. But galled by

the effrontery of Venter's challenge, the Human Genome Project

scientists closed ranks and ramped up their efforts quickly enough to

offer a draft of the genome almost as fast as Celera's nine-month

sprint. In June 2000, the increasingly bitter race came to an end in

a politically manufactured tie celebrated at the White House. The

d & #65533;tente with the public-program scientists lasted about as long as

it takes to pack up a camera crew. And by that summer, Celera, once

king of the startup biotech sector, had already begun a long sad

slide into the stock-price cellar and corporate obscurity. " My

greatest success is that I managed to get hated by both worlds, "

Venter told me on St. Barts.

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Can anyone say supergenius? This man could be the big hope. He could

actually figure out how to undo the bioweapons damage that the

vaccine industry and the biowarfare industry has unleashed in the

world.