J. Craig Venter, a biologist and entrepreneur who helped shape the modern field of genomics, died on April 29, 2026, at 79 following unexpected side effects from treatment of a recently diagnosed cancer, according to an announcement from the J. Craig Venter Institute.
Venter was a polarizing but well-respected figure in the world of genomics.
“He liked to burn brightly,” says Jonathan A. Eisen, an evolutionary microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, who credits Venter with launching his faculty career and who collaborated with him for decades. “He wanted to do big things. . . . He was rude to many people; he was loud and aggressive, but he was also strangely thoughtful.”
Born in Salt Lake City, Venter was drafted and served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. Then he began studying biology, earning his BS in biochemistry in 1972 and his PhD in physiology and pharmacology in 1975, both at the University of California, San Diego. He then took a job as professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the University at Buffalo.
But Venter’s evolution into a leading scientific figure began with controversy. In 1984, Venter joined the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) as section chief of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). At NINDS, he worked on a project to sequence genes that were expressed in the human brain, and he developed expressed sequence tags (ESTs), partial DNA sequences of complete genes in complementary DNA (cDNA) libraries. ESTs allow easy amplification of full gene transcripts taken from tissue samples. Then, in a 1990 congressional hearing, Venter mentioned that the NIH intended to patent the thousands of genes he was identifying using ESTs. His comment sent the scientific world into a frenzy, with critics saying the patents would hinder the biotech industry. Eventually a court ruled that to patent a gene, the underlying function must be known, and the NIH dropped its pursuit of the patents.
In 1992 Venter left the NIH to found the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). There he worked to develop the whole-genome shotgun (WGS) approach to DNA sequencing. Instead of mapping the genome first (with restriction fragments, for example), this method breaks the whole genome into short sections, sequences all of them, and then uses software to assemble overlapping segments into bigger chunks. While WGS is much faster and widely used today, at the time, it was considered less accurate and therefore was slow to be adopted.
In 1995 Venter’s group proved the effectiveness of WGS and stunned many scientists by publishing the very first complete genome sequence of a bacteria, Haemophilus influenzae Rd (Science 1995, DOI: 10.1126/science.7542800).
“He wanted to do big things. . . . He was rude to many people; he was loud and aggressive, but he was also strangely thoughtful.”
A career in genomics
While Venter was working on the H. influenzae genome, the international collaboration that was the Human Genome Project (HGP) was getting up and running. That group, led by Francis S. Collins and with a budget of $3 billion, depended on breaking the human genome into bacterial artificial chromosomes. Scientists painstakingly organized genome sections of 150,000–300,000 base pairs into these vectors and then hierarchically assembled them to piece the genome together.
J. Craig Venter (left) stands with US president Bill Clinton (middle) and Francis S. Collins, celebrating the completion of the first human genomes in 2001. Credit:
AP Images
Then, in 1998, Venter, thinking that his WGS methodology was quicker and cheaper than the HGP’s approach, founded Celera Genomics to race the HGP to become the first to sequence the human genome. The HGP and Celera genomes were both completed in 2000, and US president Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair brokered a tie to encourage a greater public-private partnership. In 2001 the HGP genome was published in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/35057062), and the Celera genome was published in Science one day later (DOI: 10.1126/science.1058040).
According to Eisen, Venter “did not believe in the rules by which you were supposed to operate in research—in good and bad ways.” He could be difficult to work with, had a risqué sense of humor, and did not excel at sharing credit, Eisen says; yet he also pushed the envelope of what was possible.
In 2002 Celera’s board fired Venter over conflicts with the company’s main investor. Venter founded another research institute that eventually merged with TIGR.
Venter continued to lead teams that produced trailblazing whole-genome sequences, including the first fruit fly, mouse, and rat genomes in the early 2000s. And in 2007, he published his own genome, becoming the first individual to have their whole genome sequenced (PLOS Biol., DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050254).
Controversy also continued to follow Venter. In 2010 Venter claimed to have made the first synthetic life by synthesizing a full bacterial genome and putting it into a cell (Science 2010, DOI: 10.1126/science.1190719). Many critics argued that Venter’s approach wasn’t meaningfully creating new life but still heralded the work as a significant achievement.
Venter’s career included several more entrepreneurial pursuits and achievements, including the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition. Venter, an avid sailor, wanted to sample marine diversity and sent his personal yacht and a team of scientists to circumnavigate the globe, collecting and sequencing microbial genomes. President Barack Obama also awarded Venter the National Medal of Science in 2008.
Max Barnhart is an assistant editor and life sciences reporter at C&EN.
Laurel Oldach is a senior editor and life sciences reporter at C&EN.
2026 American Chemical Society
