Reacción a "Craig Venter, the biologist and entrepreneur who decoded the human genome, has died "

One of the most influential, passionate, combative and ambitious scientists of our time has died. He was undoubtedly a one-of-a-kind figure who deserves to be remembered not for his frequent self-centred stances, but for his contributions.

The race to sequence the human genome in 2001 has been described as a battle between the public project, which began in 1988, led first by James Watson (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) and then by Francis Collins (NIH), in collaboration with the Sanger Institute in Cambridge and many other laboratories, and the private project, led by the company Celera Genomics, founded by Craig Venter in 1998. In reality, no such battle existed; it was more a collaboration than a competition.

Craig Venter developed the DNA sequencing method known as ‘shotgun’, based on breaking DNA molecules into numerous small fragments that were easy to sequence, and then reassembling them into the correct sequence. But to do this, he needed external references: a map, a well-established physical map, which was provided by the public project. In other words, both projects needed each other. The map made it possible to know where to place the DNA fragments sequenced by Celera and Craig Venter. And the vast number of fragments they produced enabled the public project to complete the genome as well. The result was a dual publication in February 2001. Craig Venter published his ‘private’ genome in the journal Science, and the public Human Genome Project was reported in the journal Nature.

The scientific community and society at large benefited from this apparent struggle, which turned out to be more of an effective collaboration, a mutual aid, albeit initially a reluctant, bitter contest. But even the proudest and most arrogant of scientists, such as Venter, who wanted to crush and outdo the public Human Genome Project, overwhelming it with his state-of-the-art machines and mass sequencing applications, had to eventually acknowledge that without the general map they had constructed (and freely shared), the public genome project would not have been able to complete the puzzle; they would not have been able to place their millions of small DNA fragments in the correct place. Unity is strength.

Naturally, Craig Venter left his mark on the genome, as one of the five people used to obtain the private genome was himself. Can we think of anything more narcissistic than sequencing your own genome for the rest of the world to use as a reference? That was Venter. But Venter will also be remembered for his contributions to synthetic biology, for having produced the first synthetic cell in the laboratory in 2010. His team engineered the bacterium Mycoplasma laboratorium, splicing together different DNA fragments and genes to create a minimal genome that allowed the resulting cell to self-replicate, despite having been created in the laboratory. This was certainly spectacular, opening up a field that has continued to advance. He also deserves to be remembered for his pioneering initiatives in obtaining metagenomes from nature. In other words, sequencing DNA present in ecosystems and, from there, deducing the genomes of the microorganisms present and discovering new genes with potential applications.

We bid farewell to a towering figure, someone who, despite his flaws, managed to have his name associated with one of the most significant undertakings we humans have ever set ourselves: to be the first and only species capable of reading and interpreting its own genome. Nothing more and nothing less.