What did craig venter discover

John Craig Venter born October 14, is an American scientist.

Is craig venter still alive

He is known for leading one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and led the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. He was listed on Time magazine's and Time list of the most influential people in the world. In , Venter was honored with Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research.

He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in In his youth, he did not take his education seriously, preferring to spend his time on the water in boats or surfing. According to his biography, A Life Decoded , he was said never to be a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds on his eighth-grade report cards. His father died suddenly at age 59 from cardiac arrest, giving him a lifelong awareness of his own mortality.

He quotes a saying: "If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life. Although he opposed the Vietnam War , Venter was drafted and enlisted in the United States Navy where he worked as a hospital corpsman in the intensive-care ward of a field hospital. Being confronted with severely injured and dying marines on a daily basis instilled in him a desire to study medicine, although he later switched to biomedical research.

Venter began his college education in at a community college , College of San Mateo in California , and later transferred to the University of California, San Diego , where he studied under biochemist Nathan O. After working as an associate professor , and later as full professor, at the State University of New York at Buffalo , he joined the National Institutes of Health in Venter was passionate about the power of genomics to transform healthcare radically.

Venter believed that shotgun sequencing was the fastest and most effective way to get useful human genome data.