Comment by apitman

11 hours ago

Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins.

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apitman

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epistasis  9 hours ago

"Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable.

So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:

https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com...

  • codeulike  4 hours ago

    It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up.

    Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem.

    So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing

  • peterfirefly  41 minutes ago

    Involved in the sense that his method worked and the one the Human Genome Project insisted on didn't. In the end, they had to use his method to catch up enough that everybody could pretend they did it together and collaboratively -- even though Venter clearly got there first. Venter deserved a Nobel Prize for that and, quite frankly, the Human Genome Project guys deserved a firing.

dnautics  11 hours ago

i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him

  • jltsiren  11 hours ago

    Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly.

    The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.

  • acmj  11 hours ago

    You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample.

    • mbreese  10 hours ago

      It gets a little fuzzy when talking about Celera and the human genome project. The two efforts were very much competitors, but there was a lot of crossover (mainly from Celera pulling in the public data).

      But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it).

      > After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1]

      [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/04/223919/craig-ven...

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