J. Craig Venter, the biochemist whose private company Celera Genomics ran the public Human Genome Project to a tied finish in June 2000 and rewrote how American science gets funded, died Wednesday at his home in La Jolla, California. He was 79. The cause of death was pneumonia, a Venter family spokesperson confirmed to the New York Times. [1] He had been treated for pulmonary complications since late February.

Venter's defining episode was the genome race, and the genome race is the way obituaries will frame his life this morning. The fuller frame requires the second act: after Celera he founded Synthetic Genomics and the J. Craig Venter Institute, where in 2010 he and his collaborators became the first scientists to assemble a complete bacterial genome from synthetic DNA and insert it into a living cell. The synthetic-cell paper in Science was the moment biology stopped being only a science of reading and became a science of writing as well. He gave a TED talk that year called "Watson, Crick, me, and you," in which he made an argument the establishment scientific community has not yet fully absorbed: the next century of biology would be a chemistry-of-information century, with genome-design tools occupying the place that chip-design tools held in the second half of the twentieth.

The genome race itself, as told most thoroughly by James Shreeve in "The Genome War," was a sprint between two organizational logics. The public effort was a fifteen-year, multi-laboratory, single-author-on-the-paper effort funded through the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health under Francis Collins. Venter's Celera was a single-company effort using a sequencing strategy he had earlier called "shotgun." Both finished in time for the June 26, 2000 White House ceremony at which President Clinton, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on a satellite link, announced the completion of a working draft of the human genome. Both teams were on the dais. Both released their drafts in February 2001 in separate journals. Both papers became the most-cited papers of the decade. The race produced a draft genome years before the public project's 2005 target. [2]

The race also produced a politics. Venter's argument — that competition could be a science-funding accelerant rather than a distraction — was, at the time, contested by most senior scientists and supported by most economic analysts. The argument, as Carl Zimmer noted on X this morning, has won. The CRISPR field's competitive dynamics in the 2010s, the AlphaFold protein-folding race in the 2020s, and the OpenAI / Anthropic / xAI commercial-AI competition at this paper's frontier today all sit in the structure Venter pioneered. They are arguments about what speed does to science, and they all assume — without quite saying — that the answer is closer to Venter's than to Collins's.

Venter was born on October 14, 1946, in Salt Lake City. His youth was unstructured. He was a poor student who became a high-school surfer, served as a Vietnam corpsman in 1968 (the experience that, by his own account, made him a scientist), earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of California, San Diego. He worked at the National Institutes of Health from 1984 to 1992. The break with the NIH came over a sequencing methodology dispute and the question of whether genes could be patented; Venter favored a streamlined sequencing approach using "expressed sequence tags," which Collins's program at NIH did not yet endorse. Venter left to found The Institute for Genomic Research in 1992, which sequenced the first complete bacterial genome (Haemophilus influenzae) in 1995 — a year before the public project sequenced its first chromosome.

His most-quoted scientific paper is the Science 1995 first-bacterial-genome paper. His most-read public-facing book is "A Life Decoded," his 2007 memoir. His most disputed legacy is the patenting question. Celera's commercial model, in 2000, contemplated patenting genes and selling subscription access to its database. The model was unsustainable; the public effort released its data nightly to GenBank, which made commercial patenting impractical for the great majority of human genes. By 2002 Celera had pivoted to drug discovery; by 2007 the company was acquired and absorbed. The patent-the-genome model failed. Venter accepted the failure and moved on. The synthetic-genomics second act was where his late career sat.

The Brenner CDC profile in this paper's life-section continuity, and this paper's broader lost-science series — the Forest Service's Apr 30 closure of fifty-seven wildfire research labs, Peter Raven's Apr 29 obituary marking the loss of the late-twentieth-century plant-science generation — all sit on a different axis from Venter's life. They are stories about contraction. Venter's life is a story about competition that produced expansion. The two axes are uncomfortable to hold in view at the same time. They are also the two axes the next generation of American biology must navigate. The Trump administration's reductions to the National Institutes of Health budget, announced in February, and the corresponding consolidation of biotech capital around three commercial AI-bio companies — DeepMind's Isomorphic, OpenAI's biology-research unit, and xAI's recently announced biology lab — sit much closer to Venter's competitive model than to Collins's collaborative one. Whether the new commercial concentration will produce the same scientific yield the genome race produced is the open question Venter's death poses.

He is survived by his wife, the geneticist Heather Kowalski; his son, Christopher Venter; and his sister, Susan. The J. Craig Venter Institute issued a statement Wednesday saying it would continue under existing leadership. Synthetic Genomics' research portfolio, much of it now spun out into smaller companies, will continue independently. The genome itself, the artifact whose decoding made his name, has now been sequenced for several million individual humans and assembled into reference genomes for fifty-three species. It is a working tool. It became a working tool because Craig Venter said it would be, and bet his career on the schedule.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo