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One of the stamps representing the Human Genome Project shows the overall structure of DNA. J. Craig Venter was born on October 14, 1946, in Salt Lake City, UT. He spent his youth in San Francisco, CA, where he attended high school. After high school, he joined the US Naval Medical Corps and served in Vietnam, where he provided medical care at ...
- Marc A. Shampo, Robert A. Kyle
- 10.4065/mcp.2011.0160
- 2011
- Mayo Clin Proc. 2011 Apr; 86(4): e26-e27.
- Overview
- Are you still spending much time afloat catching microbes?
- Do you have a favourite microbe?
- Your book refers to you as a maverick. Is that how you think of yourself?
- Has sequencing microbes informed your work on diseases?
- One recurring theme in the book is the difficulty of getting permits to take samples. Why?
- Could one become valuable, for example, a plastic-eating bacterium?
- What made you switch to early disease prevention?
- Are you concerned about overdiagnosis?
- How do you think artificial intelligence (AI) will change the medical landscape in ten years?
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The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome J. Craig Venter & David Ewing Duncan Belknap Press (2023)
Geneticist J. Craig Venter is best known for his role in sequencing the human genome and creating a ‘synthetic’ cell containing only genes that are necessary for life. The Voyage of Sorcerer II details his time sailing around the world as part of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition, collecting samples of marine microorganisms for DNA sequencing while braving ferocious tempests, dodging howler monkeys and diving in shark-infested waters.
Since 2004, Sorcerer II has travelled more than 100,00 kilometres, spent more than two years at sea in total and has visited 23 countries and islands across four continents. His team has collected millions of genes and sequenced nearly 1,000 marine microbial genomes, many for the first time. During cruises in 2017 and 2018, they examined microbes that colonize plastics in marine environments.
I’m still sailing, but after 65,000 miles, I’m not anxious to go overseas anymore. The scientists at the institute are still taking samples. People got overwhelmed with the data. When we first published just from the Sargasso Sea, we put all the data in GenBank. And then people started complaining that, when they did searches, all they did was hit my data. So many genes were unknown, it confused everybody.
Some of the criticism I got for starting the expeditions was that they were fishing expeditions. We did do a lot of fishing. But that’s how Darwin discovered so many species. He went out and just asked questions about nature. If anything, our approach has shown that discovery science is not a thing of the past.
To me, the most interesting ones are the incredibly diverse group [of cyanobacteria] that produce the oxygen that keeps us alive — if we don’t destroy them. These guys are constantly mutating but maintaining the ability to convert sunlight into oxygen.
The other thing that [we] discovered is that the phage [bacteriophage viruses] that grow off photosynthetic organisms actually regulate them and bring in new genes to constantly upgrade the software of their host cells. So instead of viruses wanting to kill off their cells, they’re making sure their hosts stay alive.
Well, it was considered brash and irrational to go out and start studying the biome of the ocean because I was not a trained oceanographer. In my view, I’m following my intuition and doing an experiment. It’s not trying to push people aside, but so much of science is based on undoing approaches that previous scientists have laid down.
I learnt from the late Nate Kaplan, my PhD mentor, who said the trick to being a successful scientist is to not be afraid to do the experiment. I’m not afraid to ask the questions. The fortunate thing is, most of my ideas and intuition have been right.
It certainly informed it — we are a microbial planet. We depend on them for our lives. We consider microbes and viruses bad because they cause disease, but only a tiny fraction of them do that. They’re more important for keeping us alive.
We’d be in the water in the South Pacific and it was crystal clear — you could see 200 feet. It was hard to imagine that every millilitre of that had one million bacteria and ten million viruses in it because it looked like pure water. It’s only because of genome sequencing and shotgun sequencing that we can see them. When you look at seawater under a microscope it pretty much all looks the same.
I think it’s absurd. When you are sailing from the Galapagos to the Marquesas, which is an open stretch of ocean, there’s a one-knot current. All the species belong to nobody. There are no regulations covering them. But as soon as the currents move those microbes across the 100-mile line off French Polynesia, all of a sudden those microbes become French. Protecting fishing rights makes sense but protecting microbes that drift in and out doesn’t.
We made it clear that all the data were going into the public domain and nothing was being patented. Then we started to get the opposite complaint: that because we’re putting it in the public domain, we were ruining [nations’] patent rights. And we barely scratched the surface of things. I don’t think there have been any billion-dollar bugs (microbes) that came out of the species that we’ve discovered.
You know, there are a lot of plastic-eating things. I think what’s going to happen with synthetic biology is that the synthetic pathways from these organisms will be taken and put into new bugs for manufacturing. But we just did an initial survey. There are tens of millions of microenvironments in the ocean. There’s wind stirring up the water. The ...
Human Longevity was based on early analysis of my genome. According to the data, I was at risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. [But] you can’t just look at the genome and understand it. So I asked my neurologist friends if they would do a brain MRI on me. The neurologist said that the MRI showed that I had the brain of a 30- or 40-year-old. Good news.
So, the mutation was not, in my case, predictive. That’s where I got the idea to set up a clinic where we do extensive phenotyping along with sequencing the genome to try and get real data on these things. I stipulated that we were only going to do tests on asymptomatic people. And just by doing these tests — like sampling in the ocean — we discovered that roughly 50% of the self-described healthy people that came through have a significant disease or risk of disease that they were completely unaware of.
We’ve found so many different diseases early because it was a pretty comprehensive physical. Now we have major grant applications pending to start two mobile clinics, one largely for Indigenous and underserved populations, where the cost would be free. But we’ve had to battle with the medical community. I’ve angered a lot of physicians who think th...
It’s going to help immensely, but there is a downside. Until you can sue a computer for malpractice, a high percentage of times the AI systems will just make things up. Until we can trust AI systems to give a truthful answer, we can’t just turn over medical diagnosis to them. The thing to do is limit the AI’s training set. I’m on the scientific adv...
- Heidi Ledford
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Next, the 1961 discovery of mRNA (Jacob & Monod, 1964) and the 1966 cracking of the genetic code (Figure 1; ... (NIH) scientist J. Craig Venter. For several years, ...
J. Craig Venter will deliver the Mendel Lecture June 18th at the European Human Genetics Conference. Craig Venter is the founder, chairman and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, CA, United States. He will be giving the Mendel Lecture on Tuesday June 18 at 13.30 hrs. He talked to Mary Rice about his life and work.
The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) is a world leader in genomic research with approximately 120 scientists and staff who are bold innovators fearlessly pursuing revolutionary ideas. With a long track-record of creativity and an interdisciplinary approach to genomics, JCVI is committed to accelerating foundational scientific research to drive ...
Nov 7, 2013 · Nov 7, 2013 6:41 AM. J Craig Venter sequenced the human genome. Now he wants to convert DNA into a digital signal. J Craig Venter has been a molecular-biology pioneer for two decades. After ...
May 3, 2016 · Craig Venter had just become the first person in human history to stare the full extent of his own genetic determinism in the face. ... to health questionnaires completed by Discovery's health ...
