Venter was an abrasive dick, but his general "we can just do things" attitude was transformative in modern genomics. He went against the plodding consensus, and succeeded time after time, first with EST sequencing, then with shotgun sequencing of bacteria and most famously with shotgun sequencing of flies and humans.
I will never forget sitting behind Francis Collins and Eric Lander (the chief honshos of the public human genome project) at the CSHL Biology of Genomes meeting in 1998 right when Venter's Celera was announced, and seeing them panicking because they knew he was going to succeed and make them look like fools (which, despite their massaging of the press, he ultimately did).
I came back to the United States, hearing about a very sad news: Craig Venter passed away today. He is a pioneer, successfully sequenced the first Human genome, and tried to create Synthetic Cells. We lost a giant in Science. RIP.
@JCVenterInst