He Helped Reveal 'the Language in Which God Created Life'

J. Craig Venter, who turned decoding DNA into a high-stakes scientific sprint, died Wednesday in San Diego at the age of 79, his research institute announced. The J. Craig Venter Institute said the geneticist and entrepreneur had recently been hospitalized due to complications from cancer treatment, per the New York Times. In the 1990s, Venter challenged the $3 billion publicly funded Human Genome Project, betting that his faster "whole-genome shotgun" sequencing could catch up and even pass it. Backed by his private company Celera, he did just that, spurring a 2000 joint announcement with competitors that they'd assembled the first human genomes—using his own DNA.

"Today we are learning the language in which God created life," President Clinton said at the time, per the San Diego Union-Tribune, with Venter noting, "I think we will view this period as a very historic time, a new starting point." Earlier, in 1995, Venter's team had produced the first complete sequence of a free-living bacterium, Haemophilus influenzae, igniting a race to map the genomes of disease-causing microbes. His group later cracked the fruit fly genome as a test run for humans. Known for his outsize ego, as well as for his ability to recruit elite scientists, Venter went on to receive the Nierenberg Prize in 2007 and the National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2009. "Craig didn't just study life. He decoded it, synthesized it, and dared to ask what it meant to create it from scratch," SynBioBeta noted. Details on survivors haven't been released.