The co-winner of the 2001 Biotechnology Heritage Award J. Craig Venter, who shared the award with Francis S. Collins, played a major role in the sequencing of the human genome. Venter cofounded Celera Genomics and was president of the company until 2002. In June 2000 Celera, along with the National Human Genome Research Institute, published a working draft of the sequence of the human genome. Venter used a whole-genome shotgun sequencing approach to sequence the human genome. This method breaks a genome of interest into random, overlapping fragments of DNA that are a few thousand letters in length. Each fragment is sequenced, and the fragments are then reassembled by a computer in their correct order.
Venter earned a B.S. in biochemistry in 1972 and a Ph.D in physiology and pharmacology in 1975. Following positions on the pharmacology and biochemistry faculties at the State University of New York, Buffalo, Venter began a position at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1984. While at NIH in 1991, Venter created a novel method for gene discovery, using expressed sequence tags, short pieces of DNA made from messenger RNA, the transient intermediary nucleic acids produced from DNA and used to make proteins. These tags have the noncoding regions removed; they can be used to find the exact location of coding regions of a DNA molecule and so can be used to detect and isolate genes of interest.
Venter is the founder and president of three nonprofit organizations: the Center for the Advancement of Genomics, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation (now consolidated into one organization—the J. Craig Venter Institute). In 1992 he cofounded the Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR), a nonprofit organization that carries out structural, functional and comparative analysis of genomes and gene products from a wide variety of organisms. While at TIGR, Venter and his team were first to decode the genome of a free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, pioneering the new whole-genome shotgun technique. Venter remains a trustee of TIGR.
