Free Forum with Terrence McNally Q&A: CRAIG VENTER, Author and Scientist
Aug 28, 2008
24:15
Aired 08/26/08
CRAIG VENTER is a remarkable and entrepreneurial scientist. As such, he asks huge questions, takes on huge challenges, and has achieved huge successes.
Growing up in California, VENTER was an unremarkable student, with little interest in his schoolwork and even less motivation to complete his education. But the Vietnam War draft led to being a Navy medic, which piqued his interest in science and medicine, and jump-started his education. He received advanced degrees and established himself as a gifted and outspoken scientist.
At the National Institutes of Health he introduced novel techniques for rapid gene discovery, and his own research institute in 1995 sequenced the first genome of a living species in history, the bacterium. This success led to the dauntingly more ambitious goal of the entire human genome—billions of letters of genetic code that would test the limits of both human and computation abilities. He announced he'd do it more quickly and for far less money than the government sponsored Human Genome Project's prediction for completion—a goal he fulfilled in 2001.
http://www.jcvi.org/
CRAIG VENTER is a remarkable and entrepreneurial scientist. As such, he asks huge questions, takes on huge challenges, and has achieved huge successes.
Growing up in California, VENTER was an unremarkable student, with little interest in his schoolwork and even less motivation to complete his education. But the Vietnam War draft led to being a Navy medic, which piqued his interest in science and medicine, and jump-started his education. He received advanced degrees and established himself as a gifted and outspoken scientist.
At the National Institutes of Health he introduced novel techniques for rapid gene discovery, and his own research institute in 1995 sequenced the first genome of a living species in history, the bacterium. This success led to the dauntingly more ambitious goal of the entire human genome—billions of letters of genetic code that would test the limits of both human and computation abilities. He announced he'd do it more quickly and for far less money than the government sponsored Human Genome Project's prediction for completion—a goal he fulfilled in 2001.
http://www.jcvi.org/