April 30, 2026

expert reaction to the death of J. Craig Venter

Scientists comment on the death of American scientist Craig Venter. 

Prof Sir John Hardy, Professor of Neuroscience and Group Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute, University College London (UCL), said:

“Craig Venter was a force of nature and really an important though controversial figure. When at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) he was behind the first draft of the human genome in the human genome project. His privately funded operation famously gave DVDs with the sequence of the drosophila genome out to the attendees at a drosophila meeting to prove he was serious about competing with the NIH and Wellcome Trust funded “official” sequencing project. The race to complete the human sequence was a testosterone driven competition between the US and UK consortia with the big personalities of Francis Collins and Eric Lander on one side and Craig’s team on the other. there is no doubt that this competition speeded things up enormously and it ended really in a score draw with both sides publishing simultaneously in Science and Nature

“I had the pleasure of working with TIGR in our race to clone the presenilin genes for Alzheimer’s disease and for me this was a real pleasure apart from the lawyer negotiations before the project got started and which led to Peter Hyslop finding the presenilins first. This project was the first I was involved with which had weekly conference calls organised by Mark Adams at TIGR, and really astonishing data generation produced by the TIGR sequencing factory. It was exhilarating and fun.”

Dr Roger Highfield, Science Director, Science Museum Group, said:

“J. Craig Venter was a swashbuckling, restless pioneer of genome sequencing and synthetic biology. I was emailing him only a few weeks ago about a new writing project. He mentioned a new diagnosis, but the news still came as a shock. Craig was a divisive figure but had huge chutzpah and was always driven on by the science. He was never going to win diplomat of the year, but he was always straightforward – much more so than some of his critics, as I discovered while editing his memoir, A Life Decoded. He was a surfer as a kid, Vietnam war medic in Danang and, despite the best efforts of the scientific establishment to ignore him, became a central figure in the genomics revolution and a pioneer of synthetic biology. Perhaps his biggest moment was in June 2000 when his privately funded company Celera unveiled its first human genome alongside the publicly funded version, a global news event. At a time when sequencing a single genome was scheduled to take many years and cost billions, Craig undoubtedly accelerated the race to the first human genome by years, not least by realising sequencing was a problem of computer power, not chemistry. After this bitterly fought and ill-tempered race, Craig published the first complete genome of an individual human in 2007 – and, of course, it was his own. He took the whole genetic makeup – or genome – of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species. In 2010, his team – at the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute that he had founded – booted up a cell using a synthetic chromosome. He sailed the world on Sorcerer II, pioneering the large-scale application of metagenomics to discover troves of genes.  In 2016, he set up Human Longevity Inc, when he found he had prostate cancer. The last time we met was in Maine in 2023 and, of course, we went for a spin on a magnificent 30s vintage sailing yacht. A rather alarming angle of heel left me gasping, flat on the deck, my head inches from the foaming sea. Craig never did anything by halves. RIP.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/science/j-craig-venter-dead.html

Declared interests

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