J Craig Venter - A Life Decoded My Genome My Life - Authors@Google

Description: J. Craig Venter visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book, "A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life." This event took place on November 12, 2007 as part of the Authors@Google series.

J. Craig Venter (born John Craig Venter October 14, 1946, Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American biologist, and businessman. Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research and was instrumental in mapping the human genome. He was listed on Time Magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

Venter is an ex-surfer and a Vietnam war veteran. According to Time, it was not always evident that he would become a transformative figure, particularly when he was a boy; according to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said to be never a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds in his eighth grade report cards. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served a tour of duty during the Vietnam War. While in Vietnam, he attempted to commit suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind more than a mile out. Venter began his academic career at a community college, College of San Mateo in California. He received his bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1972, and his Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology in 1975 both from the University of California, San Diego.

In San Diego, he married former Ph.D. candidate, Barbara Rae. After working as a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health in 1984. In Buffalo, he divorced Dr. Rae-Venter and married his student, Claire M. Fraser, and remained married to Ms. Fraser until 2005. While at NIH, Venter learned of a technique for rapidly identifying all of the mRNAs present in a cell, and began to use it to identify human brain genes. The short cDNA sequence fragments discovered by this method are called expressed sequence tags, or ESTs, a name coined by Anthony Kerlavage at The Institute for Genomic Research. Venter controversially filed patents on several of these gene fragments. The NIH later withdrew the patent applications after public outcry, and later court cases declared that ESTs were not directly patentable. He was the former president and founder of Celera Genomics, which became famous for running a parallel version of the Human Genome Project of its own for commercial purposes, using shotgun sequencing technology in 1999. The method had been proposed for human genome sequencing, but most geneticists felt it would not be accurate enough for a genome as complicated as the human. The aim of the Celera project was to create a database of genomic data that users could subscribe to for a fee. This proved very unpopular in the genetics community and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence and release it as open access. At the same time, the HGP consortium applied political pressure to appropriate the shotgun technology and the collected data from Venter's company. There were also concerns that Venter might shatter what was supposed to be an "international" face on a landmark event in history. DNA from 5 individuals was used by Celera to generate the sequence of the human genome; one of the 5 individuals used in this project was Venter. Celera and the Human Genome Project published rival announcements of success in 2001. There was some evidence that shotgun sequencing had in fact proved less accurate than the clone-by-clone method chosen by the Human Genome Project. After his inability to collect royalties for the Human Genome, Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002.Venter resisted efforts by the company board to change the strategic direction of the company.Despite their differing motivations, Venter and rival scientist Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000, along with US President Bill Clinton.Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.

SOURCE: Authors@Google(http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks ;WIKIPEDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter)