The Secret of Life

Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of the Celera Genomics Group, is the kind of man who inspires stories -- like this one from five months ago: Venter, now 53, is speaking at Harvard Medical School. He announces that Celera's next great undertaking will be to map the roughly 1 million proteins in every human being. He goes on to say that Celera hopes to complete its so-called proteomics project in just three years.

There are people in the audience who have spent up to 15 years trying to discover and understand the function of a single protein. And here is this nervous bald guy telling them that they really needn't have wasted their time. His company will do it all -- in 3 years. And the most unbelievable thing of all is that he's probably right. Given its track record, there's every reason to believe that Celera Genomics will eventually identify, and provide the architecture for understanding, most of the proteins in the human body.

Celera Genomics may be the fastest company on Earth. The company opened its doors in May 1998. Since then, Venter's team has tackled the genome sequencing of the fruit fly and of five different human beings, and by the end of the year, it will have sequenced one strain of mouse. Each one of these scientific accomplishments is worthy of winning a Nobel Prize. The fact that one team of scientists has done all of these things in such a brief time is nothing short of astonishing.

In his younger days, Craig Venter was an indifferent student with a bad attitude. His main interest in life was catching the perfect wave on his surfboard. Then he was drafted into the Navy and served as a corpsman in Vietnam. The year that he spent in the intensive-care unit in Da Nang changed his outlook on life.

Venter returned to the United States determined to make a difference in the world. He enrolled in junior college at the College of San Mateo and then transferred to the University of California at San Diego, where he ultimately earned a PhD in physiology and pharmacology. Later, he entered the world of scientific research, receiving sponsorship from the National Institutes of Health. In 1992, frustrated by the glacial pace of genomics research, Venter started the Institute for Genomic Research (tigr) with his wife, Claire Fraser. In 1998, he joined forces with PE Corp. to create Celera Genomics. And on Monday, June 26, 2000, a mere two years after Celera opened its doors in Rockville, Maryland, the company announced that it had successfully sequenced the human genome.

In an interview with Fast Company, Venter discussed his work -- the consequences of which are sure to reverberate across the decades of the new century. What he says here is science, not science fiction. It marks the beginning of the Age of Genomics.

You've been critical of the Human Genome Project and of some of your colleagues in the field. What's wrong with traditional gene research?

Somehow, "the discovery gene" took over as the major currency in genetic science. If you discover a gene and you sell it to the pharmaceutical industry, then you get to write a major paper, you get a major promotion, you get a big-name professorship, you get a big prize -- and perhaps you get a lot of money. Traditionally, that's how the genetics field has operated.

But we changed all of that with genome shotgun sequencing -- a technique that blasts apart the whole genome and then puts it back together, like a mosaic, rather than using the brick-by-brick method of looking at individual genes. A Nobel laureate came to visit me yesterday, and he said that our publication of the Drosophila (fruit-fly) genome ruined several doctoral theses that he knows of. People in this industry used to make their living by cloning and sequencing individual genes. Fundamentally, we have put them out of business.

If you're on the outside of the scientific community, it's hard to understand how much hostility there is toward Celera and toward me.

Why is the sequencing of proteins an important next step?

Sequencing the human genome is an enabling step toward the next stage -- which is understanding all of the proteins. We're setting up a facility that will be able to sequence a million proteins each day. This project wouldn't have been feasible -- you couldn't have even considered it -- without having the genetic code sequenced and reassembled.

What's really key, what's really important, though, is the integration of this information. Think of yourself as a construction site. Your genetic code is the master blueprint. This code controls the timing mechanisms that deliver piece X to place Y in exactly the right order at exactly the right time. Proteins are the tools, the bricks, the mortar -- all of the building material on the construction site. DNA controls the timing of how those pieces come together. If the pieces arrive on the construction site in the wrong order, chaos erupts, and the building doesn't get assembled: The steel isn't supposed to be the last thing that's delivered.