Craig Venter dies

We received an e-mail just now from Joel Eissenberg, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, saying,

As you may have seen, Craig Venter died yesterday. He played an important catalytic role in accelerating genome sequencing, both for humans and for my favorite model organism, D. melanogaster. His work obviously impacted comparative genomics.

Prof Eissenberg’s post at The Angry Bear is reproduced, with permission, below the fold:

Craig Venter died yesterday at the age of 79.

As a grad student, I wondered whether it would be possible to sequence the human genome. As a postdoc, I did both Maxam and Gilbert sequencing and Sanger sequencing (first with E. coli Klenow fragment, then reverse transcriptase) a couple hundred nucleotides per reaction, each reaction taking up to a week. For the first decade that I had my own lab, we did our own sequencing, but eventually it became cheaper and faster to send the template out to be sequenced by a company.

Venter drove the progress of DNA sequencing with his own company, then allied with the NIH to complete the first draft of the human genome. Genomic sequencing has transformed medicine, as well as evolutionary biology and taxonomy.

In the last five years that I had my own lab, genome sequencing was so cheap that I had a local company sequence the entire genome of a mutant fly line I’d created in order to define the sequence at one gene. And around that time, I also got my own genome sequenced for $199.

I’m sure we would have gotten here without Craig Venter, but I’m also sure it wouldn’t have happened as quickly. I’m glad I got to see it and benefit from it.