official project was able to catch up with Dr Venter’s private one, and thus arrive at a politically brokered “tie” in the resulting race. Dr Collins, with whom he shared the glory in June 2000 when President Bill Clinton announced that tie in the East Room of the White House, was more measured. But he did observe of his rival, “We’ll never find ourselves going out for a beer on Friday nights just for the heck of it...We’re wired in a different way.” At bottom, in the minds of the Sulstons and Collinses of this world, that wiring had led Dr Venter to sell his soul to the devils of commerce. He, by contrast, regarded Celera’s creation pragmatically, as the only means available to achieve his desired end. As to riches, the easiest way to make a small fortune was to start off with a large one. And a good way to effect that transition was to have an expensive hobby. Which he did. Yachts. Two of them, though not at the same time. He called both Sorcerer. As his second wife, Claire Fraser—herself no mean microbiologist—put it, “We’d be rich, if it weren’t for that boat.” With Sorcerer the first, he battled both storms and racing competitors. But it was Sorcerer II that truly revealed the man, for she was fitted out for science rather than sailing competitions. By permitting him leisurely transoceanic cruises, sampling the DNA of what was living in the waters she traversed, she combined business with pleasure—recapitulating, in luxurious style, the 19th-century circumnavigations of HMS Beagle and HMS Challenger. More science followed: the first synthetic bacterial genome; a stripped-down “minimal” genome that is the smallest a microbe can get away with and remain alive; and numerous, though ultimately unprofitable, excursions into the elusive field of synthetic biology, in which living organisms will be rebuilt, the better to serve human needs. Ironically, considering his epiphany in the South China Sea, his last Big Idea was life extension—the real sort, not the reputational. First, in 2013, he helped found Human Longevity, a firm that proposed to extend human lifespans by understanding and subverting the biological processes of ageing. That lasted five years before he parted company with it, either (depending on who you talk to) by storming out or being fired.
Then, this January, he had another go with a venture called Diploid Genomics, after the paired chromosomes of human cells in which he felt the secrets of longevity lay. However, though he himself was prodded, poked and scanned to the nth degree during his time at Human Longevity—and said such attention to detail had saved him from undetected prostate cancer —in the end it was to no avail. Still, he had indeed done something meaningful with his life. And the bastards had certainly not ground him down. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//obituary/2026/05/01/craig-venter-raced-to-decode-the- human-genome
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