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J. Craig Venter, a scientist whose relentless ambition helped turn genetics from an artisanal trade into an industrialized information machine, died Wednesday at 79. The cause was side effects of a cancer treatment.
Along the way, he did things that can only be described as really cool. He raced against a government-funded project to sequence the first human genome, grabbing headlines around the world; traveled the ocean in his sailboat collecting genetic information about sea life; and removed a bacterium’s genome and rebooted the organism with an identical set of genes he and his team had synthesized. He drove fast cars, drank red wine, and pissed people off.
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