He wasn't from the human genome project. He (in)famously led a competing company (Celera Genomics) that was trying to use shotgun sequencing to do the same thing as the official project, but "faster".

It was a fairly big controversy at the time, because it wasn't clear you could do shotgun assembly of a genome the size of the human genome without the scaffolding that the official project put in place, and also...the company was trying to get the genome "first" so that it could file patents. It all seems a little quaint now, given how little immediately actionable information came out of the genome effort, but it was the OpenAI vs Anthropic of the late 90s.

Also, for what it's worth, my recollection is that the Venter genome is actually...Craig Venter's genome.

> It was a fairly big controversy at the time, because it wasn't clear you could do shotgun assembly of a genome the size of the human

The main controversy was indirect, e. g. several actors - including Craig - trying to patent ESTs. That scaffolding was possible was already shown before, e. g. Haemophilus influenzae in 1995: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7542800/

Shotgun assembly was not as controversial, just a more efficient divide-and-conquer approach that was mostly new-ish at the time.

> It all seems a little quaint now, given how little immediately actionable information came out of the genome effort

Well - you have the sequence, but the sequence alone does not necessarily tell everything. You just have more information than before.

He was also, in my experience, a bit of a jerk. As an undergrad I asked him "with oligo synthesis improving is there any way we stop bad actors from making recombinant pathogens?" His reply was "we can start by arresting people like you." My advisor worked with him at Celera and a decade on the amount of acrimony towards the public project was palpable.

With that and his Human Longevity company, he sounds like high level grifter.