A Life Decoded summary

In 1967, at the age of 20, Venter could not avoid being sent to Vietnam. But because an IQ test revealed a respectable score of 142, he was given the option to go to hospital corps school. This allowed Venter to avoid combat missions and serve as a corpsman, an enlisted member of the military medical unit, instead.

Practicing medicine at the Navy hospital in Da Nang, Vietnam, gave Venter a number of medical skills. Venter was a senior corpsman in the intensive care ward where he looked after victims of mines, bullets and napalm.

After having seen the darkest depths of mind, body and soul in Vietnam, Venter put all his efforts into his own education. Given his lackluster academic record, Venter returned to school in early 1969 and enrolled in classes at the college of San Mateo.

His hard work at school paid off: he received straight As in all three semesters and was accepted to the University of California, San Diego, to study biochemistry. Venter soon made his start in research, publishing his findings in scientific journals.

To launch the next phase of his career, Venter chose the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he was offered a postdoctoral junior faculty position. But when he was refused a permanent position, Venter decided to leave Buffalo.

In 1983, he was offered the chance to continue his research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the powerhouse of medical research in America. This offer would come to change Venter’s life and the course of his scientific research.

Venter had become fascinated by the idea of unraveling the secrets of the human genome – the entire genetic material of the human organism. But when he made a breakthrough that he thought could change genomic science, he suddenly found himself at the center of a heated controversy.

At the NIH, Venter developed a technique to rapidly identify human genes. This technique detects so called Expressed Sequence Tags, or ESTs, which are short fragments of DNA that can be used to draw inferences about genes. Venter became a controversial scientist when he attempted to patent newly identified genes.

On his way to deciphering of the human genome, Venter had a noteworthy success: he was the first to decode the genome of a living species.

Venter had developed a new method to decode a genome. He called this method “shotgun sequencing,” since it worked by fragmenting a genome into thousands of fragments of DNA that could then be analyzed more easily.

June 26, 2000 was probably the most important day in Venter’s life. At the White House, he met president Bill Clinton and told the world that long years of scientific research efforts had come to a successful end.

On that fateful day, Venter and Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project (HGP) jointly announced the deciphering of the entire human genome at the White House. Parallel to Venter’s research efforts at Celera, the HGP had also aimed to decode the human genome.

After deciphering the human genome, Venter found himself in search of a new purpose. He turned his attention to a project that combined two great loves of his life: science and sailing. Venter now devotes his scientific efforts to reading the ocean’s genome.

Knowing that the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere each year are altering global climate patterns, it was clear to Venter that modern life will eventually become unsustainable. But he wanted to do more than just use less oil and gas, or install a solar panel. He felt that genomics had something unique to offer.