Jordi Pérez-Tur
Research scientist at the Public Research Organisation (PRO) at the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and principal investigator at CIBERNED
The death of Craig Venter marks the loss of a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. He expanded the frontiers of genetics as no one had done since the late 19th century. His approach to making rapid progress in sequencing the human genome was crucial to reaching that milestone in 2003, 50 years after the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure.
Venter was a pioneer, not without controversy, who established several research institutes (TIGR, in 1992, which later became part of the J. Craig Venter Institute in the early years of this century), companies (Celera) and, above all, led projects that not only broke boundaries but surpassed them with spectacular innovations. His approach to sequencing the human genome came as a shock to the public programme, with a different methodology that would have required far more time to achieve its goal without EST sequencing—a technique born of the ingenuity and vision of Venter and his team. In recent years, his focus had been on the creation of synthetic cells, a rapidly expanding field.
I met him on a couple of occasions and was struck by his mental agility, the clarity of his objectives and the path he had mapped out to achieve them. He was a scientist of great intelligence, dedicated to advancing our understanding of biology. He understood where some of the key obstacles lay that needed to be overcome to open up those frontiers he loved to cross.
Although it may sound like a cliché, we bid farewell to a figure who was surely one of a kind, and of whom there are few examples in every generation.