Name: Craig Venter
Institution: Celera, Maryland
Field: Mapping the human genome
Craig Venter is everything that the publicly funded chromosome sleuths of academia disdain. They describe him like a Marvel Comics villain - the Joker of genetics, bent on world domination. Even the more moderate voices raised against him point to the industrial scale of his ambitions, then in the next breath accuse him of producing a shoddy version of the sequenced genome, the blueprint for a complete human being.
It is true that Venter has demonic drive, but there are no trails of sulphur in his office. He is a pleasant and more or less candid interview subject. He was slightly vague on the question of what genes he proposed to patent, but he answered the rest of my questions in detail and I came away with the view that there was just one thing that really frightened the scientific community - the incredible speed of his operation in Rockville, Maryland.
Since 1995, Venter's companies have unravelled the genetic code of 10 organisms, starting with the bacterium Haemophilis Influenzae. They are now moving on the human genome, causing laboratories all over the world to step up their efforts in the hope that official, publicly funded collaboration will beat Venter to it.
As we toured the new headquarters of his company, Celera, one could see why they were worried. Venter has only occupied the building for seven months, yet there are already rows of sequencing machines spewing out the information that will be pieced together to form the map of human genes. The sequencers, which cost $300,000 apiece, cannot be manufactured fast enough for Venter. As soon as the trucks are unloaded, the computers are set up, tested and put to work.
Eventually there will be 110 at Rockville and a further 260 on the west coast, which is how he hopes to finish a version of the human genome within about 18 months.
I followed Venter to the far end of the building where the main computer area is. Here the genome, the 70 to 100,000 genes that add up to a blueprint for a human being, will be stored and analysed in a relay of big mainframe computers. 'Those have 20 gigabytes of Ram,' said Venter. He gestured to another, similar-sized machine. 'And these have 12 terabytes of disc. So the entire Library of Congress would fit on about one and half of them. This processing centre will have more computing power than 90 per cent of countries.' It is only after seeing this that you realise Venter is several paces ahead of the competition. He says he wants to sequence the genome not so much to haul up the flag, but to start making use of it. Eventually, scientists and members of the public will be able to use Celera as a reference library. His internet site will be initially organised for 110 million users per year.
There is no doubt that Venter is a man of exceptional audacity, which explains why he has been painted as a kind of Rupert Murdoch of genetics. He was regarded as a failure at high school and left having refused to take any exams. Only later, when he took the routine intelligence test on being drafted to serve in Vietnam, was there any hint of his calibre. He had the highest ability of 35,000 recruits.
In Vietnam he volunteered for the medical corps, and was posted to a hospital at Da Nang where he was responsible for sorting the men who would benefit from medical treatment from those who could not be saved. Among those brought in were two young soldiers, the first of whom had died from .22 rifle shot to his head. The second was alive but had suffered intestinal injuries. Venter was struck by the tiny wound left by the bullet's path through the brain. It seemed to him to have taken very little to kill the young man. On the other hand the second soldier had much grosser injuries, which should have killed him outright. And yet he lived for several weeks.
The question of what made one man live while the other had died in a flicker apparently began to absorb the young Venter. He returned from Vietnam changed and filled with ambition. He began to study biochemistry and completed a BA and PhD in just under six years. In the seventies, he moved from San Franciso to Buffalo in New York State, where he met a researcher named Claire Fraser, who became his wife.
The crucial break in Venter's career came when he had the idea of using Messenger RNA - the stuff that produces proteins - strengthened into what is known as Complimentary DNA to locate certain genes. Using nature's own mechanisms to serve his purpose, he latched on to the way the essential part of the genome is recorded in Messenger RNA. Later he devised a method for tagging parts of the decoded regions so that genes could be distinguished from another.
The tags were a brilliant innovation and although their usefulness has been amply demonstrated, he has never quite received the praise due him. After repeatedly being turned down for government funding, Venter fled to the private sector.
John Sulston, head of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England, had insisted to me that Celera's genome would be patchy and therefore useless. I asked Venter if this was true. 'They have to find fault with what we are doing to justify the billions of dollars they get for their projects,' said Venter. 'But it is interesting that the Sanger Centre has ordered the machines that I've got while at the same time attacking their use.' What about the anxiety that he will end up owning several valuable genes and thus deprive the world? Celera has laid claim to the patents of between 100 and 300 medically important genes. 'If they would have immediate impact, we're not going to set medicine back by ignoring them. The fact is that we are going to spend $300 million sequencing the human genome and we will make it all available on the internet.'
This is true, but when one asks independent scientists about the Celera patents they raise two points. The first is that it seems improper to claim patents on genes when you do not know how they function. The second is that Celera - and other pharmaceutical companies - is basing its patent applications on reasonable guesses about where the useful or remunerative genes lie in certain chromosomes. The issues are very difficult to determine, particularly as the pharmaceutical giants are being secretive about their activities. Venter, on the other hand, is being relatively open, which is why we know that Celera is planning to patent genes. If these happen to be genes which cause common inherited diseases, they will represent a large revenue stream for Venter and the pharmaceutical concerns that buy the rights to develop each patent.
In the long term, the important thing for Venter is not who sequences the first credible human genome, or even who owns the patents. The much bigger issue is whether the market decides that the information being hectically pumped out by his automatic sequencing machines is of a sufficent standard to be useful. If it is, Celera and Venter will make a very great deal of money.
