All the secrets of the universe

What would it be like to know every letter of your genetic code — every A, C, T and G — as it swirls along the long, sinewy strands of your own double helix? J. Craig Venter knows. Called the “bad boy of science” during the race in the late 1990s to sequence the human genome, Venter became the first life form on Earth to possess this intimate self-knowledge when he announced in April 2002 what many had already suspected: that the supposedly anonymous human genome sequenced by Venter’s former company, Celera, was largely comprised of his own DNA. To many, Venter’s stunt was the equivalent of Michelangelo carving his own head on the statue of David. “Any genome intended to be a landmark should be kept anonymous,” said Arthur Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and former Celera science board member who oversaw the selection process of those who contributed to the genome. It was supposed to use several anonymous donors. “It should be a map of all of us, not of one,” said Caplan.

Venter tells me that other people also provided DNA for the Celera sequence. “But how much of it was yours?” I ask. “Two-thirds.” “Which two-thirds?” “All the good parts,” he says, with a devilish grin.

Now Venter is doing it again — setting out on outrageous and seemingly impossible projects: Creating artificial life and conducting an around-the-world sailing expedition in the spirit of Charles Darwin’s 1830s voyage on the HMS Beagle, which led him to formulate the theory of evolution. Venter says his Sorcerer II expedition, named after his 95-foot yacht, is collecting samples of microbes in seawater in an effort to catalog every gene on the planet…

Story continues below this ad

Venter is one of the most creative minds in biology, and one of the most entertaining. Supremely immodest, he surges forth like a force of nature. The possibility that this man might push over the brink into Frankenstein territory is part of the fascination. “Is it possible that you don’t know what you’re doing?” I ask. “Sure, it’s possible, but people have said that before about me. And they’ve been wrong.”

Excerpted from an article by David Ewing Duncan in ‘The San Fransisco Chronicle’, September 19