The headline "Craig Ventrr of Human Genome Project Dies at 79" is extreme misinformation.

Venter was the enemy of the Human Genome Project, he swept in late, after much discovery had been made and technology developed, and most of the data was generated. And he was going to add a tine bit of new data and then patent it so that the dream of a publicly usable human genome was impossible.

Venter was an important figure that did many good things, but his involvement with the human genome was entirely negative.

Strong disagree (I'm a computational genomicist). The "official" Human Genome Project was in a rut, doing incredibly inefficient and scientifically uninteresting chromosome walking techniques and would have taken years or even a decade more to do it the old school way. You can argue against Celera's business model (which failed anyway), but the whole reason we got the human genome when we did was the fact that Celera showed that shotgun genomics (assembling reads computationally rather than relying on physical overlaps) could work even on the human genome. And that was the future of genomics. Venter did a great service to the human and all genome projects by pushing new techniques.