| ▲ | apitman 8 hours ago |
| Craig Venter was famously involved in the Human Genome Project. He announced the first draft of the human genome alongside President Clinton and Francis Collins. |
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| ▲ | epistasis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| "Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable. So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort: https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com... |
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| ▲ | codeulike an hour ago | parent [-] | | It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up. Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem. So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing |
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| ▲ | dnautics 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| i believe he also was the human genome project, he arranged to have one of the samples be him |
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| ▲ | jltsiren 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly. The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample. | | | |
| ▲ | acmj 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample. | | |
| ▲ | mbreese 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | It gets a little fuzzy when talking about Celera and the human genome project. The two efforts were very much competitors, but there was a lot of crossover (mainly from Celera pulling in the public data). But, Venter claimed that he was the a good chunk of the genome that Celera sequenced, so I think it's fair to say he was one of the people included in the draft human genome (at least the Celera version of it). > After leaving Celera in 2002, Venter announced that much of the genome that had been sequenced there was his own. [1] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/04/223919/craig-ven... | | |
| ▲ | acmj 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am not sure what is "the draft human genome" you are talking about. Two separate human genomes were published in 2001: the HGP genome and the celera genome. The HGP genome then didn't use Venter DNA. It evolved into the current human reference genome. The celera genome contained Venter DNA but it has been completely forgotten nowadays. | | |
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| ▲ | moralestapia 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, his was the first complete genome ever sequenced (by a private entity). | | |
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