Craig Venter Biography and Photos

Venter developed a method of deciphering genomes known as whole-genome shotgun sequencing. The genome to be analyzed is broken into random, overlapping fragments of DNA that are a few thousand letters in length. Each fragment is sequenced, or read. Then the fragments are reassembled by a computer into their correct order. Although there were initially many skeptics, Venter's conviction that shotgunning would be faster and just as accurate for much genome deciphering proved to be true, and the technique is now widely used. In 1995 Venter and his team used the technique to obtain the first complete genome (DNA sequence) of an organism other than a virus, that of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. In 2000, in collaboration with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, he published almost the entire genome of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In 2001 his team and a competing group published rough drafts of the human genome.