Oh man.
This one hurts.
I raced Craig on the human genome project. It was Epic.
Although he was vilified by many of my peers.
I was young and bought into some of the vilification at the time.
I got to know him more personally after ABI purchased ApG.
Our team in Beverly even sequenced his genome, HuREF.
I came to learn my earlier perspectives on him were really flaws in my own world perspective at the time.
It was the Public vs Private science debate and I no longer look at tax funded science the way I did back then.
The C19 pandemic really emphasized this as I witnessed Craig’s arch rival turn personalized medicine into herd medicine.
After a reckless abuse of PCR-amplified pandemic fear, all the public sales pitches on precision medicine and personalized treatments went up in smoke.
The moment some of the virtuous public genome project leaders saw a window for immature genomic tools to save the world (and cover up their own lab leak), plans behind closed doors fell into place.
The transparency promised in the Bermuda accords turned into burner phones and FOIA evasion.
Suddenly the public sector displayed a whole level of unaccountability and subterfuge once garnished on Celera for the mere crime of being privately funded.
Craig was an entrepreneur who had no patience for red tape. He ruffled feathers but in the end he pushed everyone to run faster.
Some argue it came at the cost of quality but in reality, we now know we didn’t have the tools to 100% close the genome in 2000.
The last 8% took another 20 years as we had to wait for 2 generations of new sequencers to finally deliver 20-100kb reads.
We would have burned infinite money holding our breath for the last 8%.
But without that fast first 92%, 454, Solexa and SOLID would have matured later. These sequencers all relied on a human reference genome.
Sometimes we need the impatient private sector urgency spending their own money to create the price signal. What is the fastest path to a result the market will pay for?
For gov labs, this calculus departs from ROI decisions and it becomes easy to spend other people’s money in the pursuit of perfection. Public Scientists after-all are in a circular firing squad yelling perfection and , as long as someone else pays the bills, you can’t afford to compromise on perfection or the PubSmear mob will wreck you.
Pricing signals matter to get ROI decisions properly calibrated and avoiding asymtoptic costs for marginal gains.
Many will claim that Craig was out for shelf interest and was patenting 300 genes.
Public was giving it away for free.
That’s the story but it’s not true.
In the end the NIH ended up with more gene patents than Craig.
Not from their genome centers but from their funding streams. Jim Watson quit the genome project over it and some of the patents were from NIH funding Craigs EST projects.
I have a whole paper in Nature methods on Gene Patents and how to evade them with DREAM PCR.
If you were morally opposed to this, you didn’t have to buy Celera stock. Your tax dollars had no such veto right and in the end your tax dollars were used to patent genes, charge you again as those were licensed to CDX companies and raised pricing.
Suddenly the good guy vs villain story blurs into a story about human nature and poor incentive structures.
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