Gene Maverick

By Dick Thompson/Washington

It was your typical million-dollar South Beach bash: a star-studded crowd grooving to the sounds of Shotgun rocker Bruce Hornsby at a Gianni Versace mansion. But what was different about this party, thrown last September, was its guest list: 1,800 of the world's leading genomics experts drawn to Miami by a conference sponsored by Craig Venter, the enfant terrible of the gene hunters. Not everyone in the galaxy of genetics stars was there, however. Conspicuously absent was DNA co-discoverer James Watson, a former head of the federal Human Genome Project, who like other scientists in the field has had a long, troubled relationship with the party's host.

Venter's Miami gene festival captured many sides of a complex personality that seems to thrive on rattling the world of molecular biology. In his most recent seismic event, the maverick-millionaire-scientist-cum-rock-fan announced last May that his privately funded lab will decode the entire human genome years faster and for hundreds of million of dollars less than the U.S. government's vaunted Human Genome Project.

It was a brazen challenge to the scientific establishment, but Venter has a genius for making the tools of molecular biology do big things. He has decoded more genes, and faster, than anyone else in the world. He pioneered the use of automated gene sequencers. He developed the most widely used method of tagging bits of genes. And he was first to sequence the genome of an entire living organism. Nearly half the genomes that have been decoded to date were decoded in his lab.

Nonetheless, scientists with the federal project were quick to criticize Venter's new plan. They said that his genome map will be full of holes and that his financial backers will lock it up with patents, blocking the advancement of science.

They may be right. But by throwing the genome program into a competitive race, Venter has forced government-funded gene researchers to rethink their plans. Says Rockefeller University biologist Norton Zinder, who headed the first National Institutes of Health advisory panel on the Human Genome Project and recently signed on to the Venter venture: "Now everybody has awakened."

Driven, impatient, demanding, irritating, Craig Venter has a knack for making the rest of the world run at Venter speed. "I've always felt in a hurry to get things accomplished," he cheerfully confesses. He is in constant motion--lecturing in Europe, raising money on Wall Street, opening satellite centers in California. The closest he comes to relaxing is sailing on his 82-ft. sloop, the Sorcerer. Even that's a challenge. "He seldom goes for a day sail," says his wife Claire Fraser, a noted molecular biologist. "When he goes sailing, he's got to cross oceans."

No high-school graduate was ever more unlikely to succeed than Venter. He was a chronic discipline problem--even as a child he refused to take tests--and his parents despaired. In 1964, after being promoted out of high school, Venter moved from his San Francisco home to Southern California, where he dedicated himself to surfing, sailing and the life of a beach bum.

Those carefree days came to an abrupt end when Uncle Sam beckoned and Venter obliged by becoming a Navy hospital corpsman. By 1967, when he was just 21, he was in Vietnam, stationed at the Naval Hospital in Danang. Venter was the senior corpsman in the emergency room during the Tet offensive. For five days he worked around the clock to mend, save or just ease the pain of thousands of young men. Shortly after Tet, when physician Ronald Nadal met him, Venter was in trouble again, following an altercation with a senior officer whom Venter advised to perform, as Nadal tactfully describes it, "a biologically impossible act."

Nadal adopted the ne'er-do-well corpsman, and the two worked closely over the next few months. Impressed by the young man, Nadal urged him to go to college after the war. "You felt this was someone who was not educated but who had a lot of raw intelligence," he says.

"Vietnam changed him," says Fraser. "It impressed on him the idea that time is precious, that you have to make every single minute of every single day count."

Venter decided he would become a doctor and work in the Third World. In a blazing six years, he finished his coursework, published a string of papers, was awarded his Ph.D. and found himself teaching med students. Along the way, he learned that his gifts lay less in medicine than in medical research. In the late '70s he met Fraser. They were married, and except for one brief professional separation have worked side by side ever since.

In the early 1980s, Venter and Fraser were working on cell-surface receptors at the NIH. This was the dawn of the molecular revolution in biology, and the gene was emerging as the key. Finding genes was agonizingly slow work, however; scientists typically spent years locating and decoding a single one.

In 1986 Venter read a paper in the British science journal Nature describing a machine that could decode genes automatically. He flew to California and met with one of the machine's designers, Michael Hunkapiller. Within a few months, he had the first automated gene sequencer at the NIH. Within a year, the machine had decoded 100,000 letters in one region of a genome--fast, but not fast enough for Venter.

Then he had an epiphany: he realized that he didn't need to identify those parts of a cell's genome that code for proteins as long as the cell itself can identify them. Venter switched his attention from the DNA blueprint to the RNA templates the cell makes from those blueprints. His task vastly simplified, he began turning out gene sequences at unprecedented rates.

Venter's success shocked and in some cases angered the scientific world. Watson famously dismissed Venter's sequences as work "any monkey" could do, and when their feud over the issue of patents ended, they were both out of the NIH. Watson retreated to Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., to head the research lab there. Venter started talking to investors.

Venter flourished in the private sector. Backed by venture capitalist Wallace Steinberg, he founded the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and within a year had been transformed from a government scientist with a $2,000 savings account to a millionaire. He gave gifts of stock to his family and Fraser's, and bought the Sorcerer. Meanwhile, he continued to pour money into genomics, completing gene maps of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium in 1995, followed by those of H. pylori, which causes ulcers, and the syphilis microbe.

Even though TIGR was spewing out gene sequences at unprecedented rates, Venter was still restless. Then Hunkapiller called from his office at Perkin-Elmer to say that he had a new, faster machine he wanted Venter to see. What Venter saw was the future: a gene-mapping computer 50 times as fast as anything running at TIGR. With one of these machines, the 1,000 scientists who had spent 10 years decoding a yeast genome could have completed their work in one day. Emboldened by the new technology, Venter announced his plans to sequence the human genome rapidly. He founded Celera with Perkin-Elmer and promised to publish results freely on a quarterly basis. From now on, Venter said, he was in the information business, selling access to the genomic data he was gathering at breakneck speed.

With prestige and grants on the line, government and academic scientists regrouped and counterattacked. The most important naysayer, as usual, was Watson, but others quickly lined up behind him. Venter's "book of life," said one of the leaders of the federal genome program, would be a Mad magazine.

But even his many critics acknowledge that Venter is a scientist with remarkable insight--indeed, a likely Nobel prizewinner. Francis Collins, who took over the Human Genome Project after Watson's departure, concedes that Venter "stirred the pot," while Watson, still Venter's severest critic, is careful to avoid public comment on their feud. But with the race entering its final laps, Venter is prepared to stake everything he has on the outcome. "In three years or so," he promises, "one of us is going to look mighty foolish."