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Craig Venter
Summary
John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biotechnologist and businessman. He is known for leading one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. and Synthetic Genomics. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In 2012, Venter was honored with Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.
Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of Elisabeth and John Venter. In his youth, he did not take his education seriously, preferring to spend his time on the water in boats or surfing.
According to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said never to be a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds on his eighth-grade report cards. Venter considered that his behavior in his adolescence was indicative of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and later found ADHD-linked genetic variants in his own DNA. He graduated from Mills High School in Millbrae, California. His father died suddenly at age 59 from cardiac arrest, giving him a lifelong awareness of his own mortality. He quotes a saying: "If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life."
Although he opposed the Vietnam War, Venter was drafted and enlisted in the United States Navy where he worked as a hospital corpsman in the intensive-care ward of a field hospital. He served from 1967 to 1968 at the Naval Support Activity Danang in Vietnam. While in Vietnam, he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind more than a mile out.
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