Geneticist who gatecrashed race to read human genome dies at 79

J Craig Venter, the geneticist and entrepreneur whose competitive instincts helped reshape modern biology, died on Wednesday in San Diego at the age of 79.

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The J Craig Venter Institute, the nonprofit research body he founded, said in a statement he had been briefly hospitalised after unexpected side effects arising from treatment for recently diagnosed cancer.

The decoding of the human genome — the complete sequence of roughly three billion chemical base pairs that constitute the genetic blueprint of our species — was among the most consequential scientific undertakings of the 20th century. The premise for the pursuit was straightforward: read the full instruction manual of human biology, and it opens a path to understanding why diseases arise, why some people are more vulnerable than others, and how medicine might one day intervene at the level of the gene itself. The Human Genome Project (HGP), launched in 1990 as a collaboration between the US, UK and several other countries, had been built on the assumption that this would be a slow, methodical, publicly funded endeavour — a decade-long effort whose results would belong to everyone.