[tt] NYTBR: J. Craig Venter: A Life Decoded

[Premise Checker]

J. Craig Venter: A Life Decoded
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Dizikes-t.html

The Unraveling
By PETER DIZIKES

A LIFE DECODED
My Genome: My Life.
By J. Craig Venter.
Illustrated. 390 pp. Viking. $25.95.

Who is Craig Venter? One answer is that he is the scientist who
instigated the celebrated race between the government and his
former company, Celera, to produce the first complete transcription
of a human genome. By 2000, when the two parties declared their
contest a tie, Venter was a media darling, a brash, entrepreneurial
scientist with a taste for sailing and adventure: the Larry Ellison
of the lab, the Richard Branson of biology.

Venter likes this image enough to begin his memoir, A Life Decoded,
by describing how he and his childhood friends would race their
bikes down the runways of San Franciscos airport, briefly outpacing
departing planes while angering pilots and passengers. A little
decoding reveals the metaphor: Venter has always been the daring
underdog, taking the race to more powerful forces.

That settled, this autobiography is less about self-discovery than
about public justification. Venter aims to validate his role in the
genome contest, defend his motives, settle scores and recount a
career that produced several other scientific firsts. The result is
engrossing and exasperating and it does indeed suggest a rethinking
of the genome race, though perhaps not the one Venter prefers.

Venter took a circuitous path to science. An underachieving
student, he was shipped to Vietnam as a Navy medic. In a crisp
chapter, Venter recounts the war as an unrelenting nightmare of
enemy attacks and broken bodies. Out of desperation, Venter once
embarked on an ocean swim off China Beach intending to kill
himself, he says, before changing his mind. (In one of many
sidebars on his personal genome, Venter traces his aptitude for
long-distance swimming to the lack of a common mutation causing
muscle fatigue.)

Relieved to return home life was my gift, he writes Venter raced
through college, earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and by the 1980s
landed at the National Institutes of Health, studying adrenaline.
All the while, he pursued various seafaring adventures; here he
details boat races, shark encounters and a storm-tossed voyage
through the Bermuda Triangle. Score another Venter breakthrough:
this is the first science memoir that should have been serialized
in Mens Journal.

The scientific heart of Venters story begins after he adopted new
technologies to hunt for adrenaline-related genes in the late
1980s, then leapt into genomics. (A genome is an organisms entire
string of DNA, present in most human cells.) Independently, if not
uniquely, as he notes, Venter developed a clever shortcut for
identifying genes out of long stretches of DNA.

But he never found a comfortable place in the fledgling government
project to chart the human genome and in 1992 joined a new private
group, the Institute for Genomic Research. There, Venter and
colleagues became the first researchers to chart the whole genome
of any organism (the flu virus), among other landmarks, and refined
a technique allowing scientists to piece together genomes from
small bits of DNA, minimizing the ponderous genetic surveying then
in use.

Venter recounts this while lambasting N.I.H. leaders especially
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA for not
fully backing his work. Yet Venter is even more scathing about the
corporate executives he encountered, concluding that for them it
was all about greed and power, not health. By contrast, Venter
asserts, I was interested in money only to have the freedom to do
my research.

In 1998, Venter helped form Celera to sequence a human genome
(largely based on his own DNA) before the government could.
Infamously, he suggested to government scientists that they should
let him finish the human genome project and should themselves chart
a mouse genome instead an offer he still spins as his dream of
working on the human genome together with the public program.
Naturally, the government scientists did not quite see things that
way, and the race was on.

Venters narrative of this race is indeed laden with spin and
self-aggrandizement (What eventually made the difference ... is
that I led from the front) and lacks the excitement of discovery he
expresses well in earlier chapters. Then again, the human genome
contest increasingly seems an unsatisfying mix of political
squabbling and public posturing. Neither side had finished its
genome by June 2000, when they declared mutual victory amid the
pomp of a White House ceremony. This arduous tacking duel appears
very much about the glory. As Venter notes, the genome was the
biggest prize in biology.

Those outside the world of biology might simply remind themselves
there is no one human genome. Everyones genome is slightly
different, and much of the promise of genomics depends on our
capacity to sequence many genomes quickly and cheaply. That
capacity, still in development, may help us pinpoint the genetic
components of diseases, provide us with personalized medical care,
and reveal a stunningly deep picture of all evolution on earth.

A draft of one human genome is less a destination than an early
signpost on a long scientific journey; the technical advances
speeding up that journey matter as much or more. The hype over the
genome race thus both overrates and underrates Venters career. The
contest itself did not exactly revolutionize genomics, but Venters
aggressive insistence upon faster sequencing methods throughout his
career would have been influential even if no such race had
occurred.

Or, as Venter claims: We had transformed the analog version of
biology into the digital world of the computer. So who is Craig
Venter, again? Certainly a significant scientist, even if the most
important elements of his career may not be the most famous ones.

Peter Dizikes is working on a book about scientific illiteracy in
America.