Craig Venter

Craig Venter is an American biochemist and geneticist known for leading a privately funded effort to sequence the human genome that ran in parallel with, and helped accelerate the completion of, the publicly funded Human Genome Project. Venter founded the company Celera Genomics in 1998 and championed the whole-genome shotgun sequencing method, which breaks a genome into many overlapping fragments that are sequenced separately and then reassembled computationally, a faster approach than the methods the public project had originally planned to rely on. Both efforts announced a working draft of the human genome together in 2000. Venter later founded the J. Craig Venter Institute, where his research team announced in 2010 the creation of the first cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome, a milestone widely reported as a step toward synthetic biology, and his institute has continued work sequencing genomes across a wide range of organisms and environments.