Ángel Raya Chamorro
ICREA Research Professor and Coordinator of the Regenerative Medicine Programme at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), member of CIBER-BBN, Director of the Clinical Translation Programme in Regenerative Medicine in Catalonia, and Professor of Physiology at the University of Barcelona.
He was certainly a remarkable figure… We have lost one of those figures who split the history of science in two. For those of us working in developmental genetics, his legacy is not merely technical, but vital: I remember the mixture of unease and fascination when our laboratory subscribed to the Celera Discovery System, his private search engine. It caused me a huge conflict: the ‘right’ thing, the straight and narrow path, was the public project; Venter’s venture represented the private sector, with its haste and ambition to secure patents. But the reality is that that tool allowed us to undertake projects that were previously unthinkable. And that tension, that paradox between the public and the private, is an inescapable part of his history and of ours.