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.
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.
> 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.
> The main controversy was indirect, e. g. several actors - including Craig - trying to patent ESTs.
You're under-selling it. Celera filed thousands of patents on expressed sequence tags, long before anyone knew anything about them. It was a land grab.
Also, it only seems obvious if you're looking back at it with 20+ years of hindsight, but it was quite unclear at the time if it was possible to obtain a full read of the genome from shotgun sequencing alone. The human genome is 3000x larger than H. influenzae, and significantly more complex.
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.
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.
You're under-selling it. Celera filed thousands of patents on expressed sequence tags, long before anyone knew anything about them. It was a land grab.
Also, it only seems obvious if you're looking back at it with 20+ years of hindsight, but it was quite unclear at the time if it was possible to obtain a full read of the genome from shotgun sequencing alone. The human genome is 3000x larger than H. influenzae, and significantly more complex.