Genomics Pioneer J. Craig Venter Dies at 79

J. Craig Venter, the biologist who spearheaded the race to sequence the human genome and pioneered synthetic biology, died Wednesday in San Diego at age 79.

The J. Craig Venter Institute, the nonprofit research organization he founded in La Jolla, California, and Rockville, Maryland, announced his death. Venter had been hospitalized briefly for unexpected side effects arising from treatment for a recently diagnosed cancer, the institute said in a statement.

Venter's career transformed genomics from a painstaking, gene-by-gene process into a scalable, data-driven field. After serving in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps during the Vietnam War, where he worked as a hospital corpsman, Venter pursued higher education. He attended community college in California before transferring to the University of California, San Diego, and joined the National Institutes of Health in the 1980s.

There, he developed automated sequencing techniques, including expressed sequence tags, short DNA fragments that accelerated gene discovery but sparked controversy when he proposed patenting them despite their unknown functions. Frustrated by the pace of the publicly funded Human Genome Project, launched in...