Craig Venter is the future

The most groundbreaking science is being done outside academia and government. And the egomaniacal geneticist is leading the way.

By Jonathon Keats

Read more: Books, Medicine, Science, Genetics, Books Features

Dec. 5, 2007 | As an employee of the National Institutes of Health in the '80s, J. Craig Venter once found himself trailed by two men in suits. After shadowing him for a day in their brown Ford Fairlane, they appeared unannounced at his lab, where they showed him ID cards from the Department of Defense. The men asked him about his work on receptor proteins, which make cells sensitive to chemicals such as adrenaline. Might those proteins also be used to detect nerve poisons? While Venter had previously organized war protests, he'd also served as a medic in Vietnam, and his current research interests coincided with the military's. The questions they were asking were scientifically pertinent. So he accepted a Defense research grant of $250,000.

The NIH was not pleased. Administrators looked upon the money with institutional jealousy. Begrudgingly they set up a special account for his nerve poison research -- and bluntly informed Venter that he was "perhaps too entrepreneurial."

That, of course, was an understatement. Within a decade, Venter was in direct competition with the NIH, backed by $300 million in corporate funding against the agency's multibillion-dollar budget, engaged in arguably the most high-stakes clash in the history of science. The Human Genome Project, which made Venter one of the most admired and reviled figures in the world, has provided a genetic template for studying our species. At the same time, Venter's success dramatizes a paradigm shift in the culture of science, demonstrating the power of noninstitutional research. In the 20th century, the tenured professional supplanted the independent gentleman scientist: James Watson succeeded Charles Darwin. In the 21st century, the tenured professional is becoming outmoded, replaced by the intellectual entrepreneur: The mantle is passing from Watson to Venter.

Like Darwin, Venter was not quick to show his potential. In high school, the only A's he received were in P.E., wood shop and swimming, and, while he was a good enough athlete to get offered a scholarship by Arizona State, he opted instead for bodysurfing on the Southern California beaches and a night job pricing toys at Sears. That came to an end with the Vietnam War. He joined the Navy, which offered him his choice of positions after he scored an unexpected 143 on an IQ test. The medical corps looked best, because it required the briefest tour. Thus began Venter's unlikely career in medicine and science, propelled by the intoxication of accomplishment, leading from the tents of Da Nang to the lecture halls of U.C. San Diego to the laboratories of SUNY Buffalo, where he taught and conducted research for several years before taking a position at the NIH.

The rapidity of Venter's ascent, however, could never keep pace with his ambition, or his ego, and his tenure at the NIH was tempestuous from beginning to end. In his new memoir, "A Life Decoded," he constantly casts himself as a prophet amongst philistines: "I knew that I had made a breakthrough that could change genomic science," he writes of his most storied struggle, "and I was wasting my time, energy, and emotion on battling with a group that had no serious interest in letting an outsider analyze the human genome."

So he left. Simply put, Venter believed that he had a faster and cheaper way to sequence the genome than was feasible using the approved methodology, and that other laboratories were thwarting him because of territorialism and fear of losing funding. His assessment was essentially accurate, and their caution was largely justified. Venter's approach, called shotgun sequencing, was daring scientifically and risky politically, unproven at a scale even approaching the human genome, yet likely to make Congress question why the government was allocating so much for the NIH's safer methods. In other words, funding for him might mean less funding all around, and if he failed to deliver, no second chance for the genome.

Private money, on the contrary, was a different matter. By leaving the NIH, Venter escaped the entrenched interests of a stratified bureaucracy, entering into a realm that embraced risk as an investment strategy. Of course, for a scientist interested in answering fundamental questions rather than improving shareholder returns, that can present a different set of problems.

Venter's turbulent relationship with HealthCare Ventures, which funded his Institute for Genomic Research when he left the NIH, and with PerkinElmer, with which he formed Celera Genomics after his HealthCare Ventures partnership collapsed, amply illustrate the challenges of intellectual entrepreneurship in a venture capitalist economy. Businesses want to protect their investments, which translates into monopoly control or secrecy, policies anathema to open scientific exchange.

Moreover, expectations are often unrealistic. Venter scornfully writes of the "one gene, one protein, one billion dollars" mantra -- referring to the manufacture of drugs in a petri dish -- and points out that fewer than a dozen of the approximately 23,000 human genes have ultimately been lucrative for investors. Good research takes time, and success often rests on failure, notions that every Ph.D. understands but that confound the average MBA.

Venter got the human genome first -- and considerably accelerated the NIH effort in the process -- because he held nothing sacred other than the quest for knowledge. At times, sheer stubbornness drove him forward. He made his $300 million deal with PerkinElmer despite his failed HealthCare Ventures partnership, and ignoring advice from his lawyer to "get the hell away from them while you still can," for the simple reason that the human genome was "the biggest prize in biology," and was attainable only with big pharmaceutical money.

In other instances, he engineered shrewd compromises, such as publicly releasing the raw genome while constructing restricted-access databases designed to make the sequences more useful for industry. He was fired by Celera anyway -- officially because Celera was moving into drug discovery, unofficially because the company could no longer contain his ego -- but not before he had a chance to announce, at a televised ceremony in the Clinton White House on June 26, 2000, that "for the first time, our species can read the chemical letters of its genetic code." And afterward? That was the real start of Venter's career as an intellectual entrepreneur.

Next page: Venter is not the only independent scientist pushing the edges of research