John Craig Venter (October 14, 1946 – April 29, 2026) was an American geneticist and businessman. He is known for having led one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and led the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc., and Synthetic Genomics.
Venter was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 lists of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed him as 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In 2012, Venter was honored with the Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. He was a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.
John Craig Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 14, 1946, the son of Elisabeth and John Venter. His family moved to Millbrae, California, during his childhood. In his youth, he did not take his education seriously, preferring to spend his time on the water in boats or surfing. According to his autobiography, A Life Decoded, he was never a highly engaged student, having Cs and Ds on his eighth-grade report cards.
Venter considered that his behavior in his adolescence was indicative of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and later found ADHD-linked genetic variants in his own DNA. He graduated from Mills High School. His father died suddenly at age 59 from cardiac arrest, giving him a lifelong awareness of his own mortality. He quoted a saying: "If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life."
He opposed the Vietnam War, but enlisted in the United States Navy to avoid being drafted. He trained as a medic and worked as a hospital corpsman in the intensive-care ward of a field hospital at Naval Support Activity Danang in Vietnam for a year in 1967–68. Stressed by the intensity of the Tet Offensive, he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but came to his senses and swam back to shore. Treating thousands of injured soldiers instilled in him a desire to study medicine.
He began his college education in 1969 at a community college, College of San Mateo in California, and later transferred to the University of California, San Diego, where he studied under biochemist Nathan O. Kaplan. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry in 1972 and a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology in 1975 from UCSD.
After working as an associate professor, and later as full professor, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1984.
While an employee of the NIH, Venter learned how to identify mRNA and began to learn more about how it is expressed in the human brain. The short cDNA sequence fragments Venter discovered by automated DNA sequencing, he named expressed sequence tags, or ESTs. The NIH Office of Technology Transfer decided to file a patent on the ESTs discovered by Venter, patenting the genes identified based on studies of mRNA expression in the human brain. When Venter disclosed the NIH strategy during a Congressional hearing, a firestorm of controversy erupted. The NIH later stopped the effort and abandoned the patent applications it had filed, following public outcry.
Venter was passionate about the power of genomics to transform healthcare radically. Venter believed that whole genome shotgun sequencing was the fastest and most effective way to get useful human genome data. However, the method was rejected by the Human Genome Project, since some geneticists felt it would not be accurate enough for a genome as complicated as that of humans, that it would be logistically more difficult, and that it would cost significantly more.
He viewed the slow pace of progress in the Human Genome Project as an opportunity to continue his interest in trying his shotgun sequencing method to speed up human genome sequencing, so he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee. The goal consequently put pressure on the public genome program and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence. Venter's effort won him renown as he and his team at Celera Corporation shared credit for sequencing the first draft human genome with the publicly funded Human Genome Project.
In 2000, Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Public Genome Project jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome, a full three years ahead of the expected end of the Public Genome Program. The announcement was made along with U.S. President Bill Clinton, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.
On February 15, 2001, the Human Genome Project consortium published the first Human Genome in the journal Nature, followed one day later by a Celera publication in Science. Despite some claims that shotgun sequencing was in some ways less accurate than the clone-by-clone method chosen by the Human Genome Project, the technique became widely accepted by the scientific community.
Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002. According to his biography, Venter was fired because of a conflict with the main investor, Tony White, specifically barring him from attending the White House ceremony celebrating the achievement of sequencing the human genome. White was sidelined at the ceremony and the presentation of the result as a tie weakened Celera's claims. White wanted to monetize the achievement by turning Celera into a pharmaceutical company but Venter was not interested in that, had no experience of that business and so was dispensable.
Global Ocean Sampling Expedition
The Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS) is an ocean exploration genome project with the goal of assessing the genetic diversity in marine microbial communities and to understand their role in nature's fundamental processes. Begun as a Sargasso Sea pilot sampling project in August 2003, the full Expedition was announced by Venter on March 4, 2004. The project, which used Venter's personal yacht, Sorcerer II, started in Halifax, Canada, circumnavigated the globe and returned to the U.S. in January 2006.
In June 2005, Venter co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a firm dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce clean fuels and biochemicals. In July 2009, ExxonMobil announced a $600 million collaboration with Synthetic Genomics to research and develop next-generation biofuels. Venter continued to work on the development of engineered diatomic microalgae for the production of biofuels.
Venter sought a patent for the first partially synthetic species possibly to be named Mycoplasma laboratorium. There is speculation that this line of research could have led to the production of bacteria that are engineered to perform specific reactions, for example, produce fuels, make medicines or combat global warming.
In May 2010, a team of scientists led by Venter became the first to produce successfully what was described as "synthetic life". This was done by synthesizing a very long DNA molecule containing an entire bacterium genome, and introducing this into another cell, analogous to the accomplishment of Eckard Wimmer's group, who synthesized and ligated an RNA virus genome and "booted" it in cell lysate. The single-celled organism contains four "watermarks" written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and to help trace its descendants. These watermarks include: