Craig Venter of Human Genome Project Dies at 79

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.

Also from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957101 (83 comments)

science advances one funeral at a time

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.