Craig Venter

In April 2022 Venter sold the La Jolla JCVI facility to the University of California, San Diego for $25 million. The university, which already has a very strong genomics program, hopes to absorb most of the Institute's faculty and its current research grants. Venter will continue to lead a separate nonprofit research group, also known as the J. Craig Venter Institute, and stressed that he is not retiring.

Venter was 75 when he sold his main research facility, the J. Craig Venter Institute, to UCSD in 2022. He said he has no intention of retiring and would continue to lead a separate nonprofit research group, but he was recovering from a difficult bout with COVID-19 and was tired of management responsibilities. He has a home in La Jolla and a ranch in Borrego Springs, California, as well as homes in two small towns in Maine. He indulges in two passions: sailing and flying small planes, which he calls "the ultimate freedom".

In August 2018, Venter retired as chairman of the board, saying he wanted to focus on his work at the J. Craig Venter Institute. He will remain as a scientific advisor to the board.

Human Longevity filed a lawsuit in 2018 against Venter, accusing him of stealing trade secrets. Allegations were made stating that Venter had departed with his company computer that contained valuable information that could be used to start a competing business. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by a California judge on the basis that Human Longevity were unable to present a case that met the legal threshold required for a company, or individual, to sue when its trade secrets have been stolen.

In May 2017, Venter was the guest of honor and keynote speaker at the inauguration ceremony of the Center for Systems Biology Dresden.

On March 25, 2016, Venter reported the creation of Syn 3.0, a synthetic genome having the fewest genes of any freely living organism (473 genes). Their aim was to strip away all nonessential genes, leaving only the minimal set necessary to support life. This stripped-down, fast reproducing cell is expected to be a valuable tool for researchers in the field.

On March 4, 2014, Venter and co-founders Peter Diamandis and Robert Hariri announced the formation of Human Longevity, Inc., a company focused on extending the healthy, "high performance" human lifespan. At the time of the announcement the company had already raised $70 million in venture financing, which was expected to last 18 months. Venter served as the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) until May 2018, when he retired. The company said that it plans to sequence 40,000 genomes per year, with an initial focus on cancer genomes and the genomes of cancer patients.

In the June 2011 issue of Men's Journal, Venter was featured as the "Survival Skills" celebrity of the month. He shared various anecdotes and advice, including stories of his time in Vietnam, as well as mentioning a bout with melanoma on his back, which subsequently resulted in his "giving a pound of flesh" to surgery.

In May 2011, Venter was the commencement speaker at the 157th commencement of Syracuse University.

In May 2010, a team of scientists led by Venter became the first to create successfully what was described as "synthetic life". This was done by synthesizing a very long DNA molecule containing an entire bacterium genome, and introducing this into another cell, analogous to the accomplishment of Eckard Wimmer's group, who synthesized and ligated an RNA virus genome and "booted" it in cell lysate. The single-celled organism contains four "watermarks" written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and to help trace its descendants. The watermarks include

On May 20, 2010, Venter announced the creation of first self-replicating semi-synthetic bacterial cell.

Venter delivered the 2008 convocation speech for Faculty of Science honours and specialization students at the University of Alberta.

In February 2008, he gave a speech about his current work at the TED conference.

Venter was featured in Time magazine's "The Top 10 Everything of 2008" article. Number three in 2008's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries was a piece outlining his work stitching together the 582,000 base pairs necessary to invent the genetic information for a whole new bacterium.

On September 4, 2007, a team led by Sam Levy published one of the first genomes of an individual human—Venter's own DNA sequence. Some of the sequences in Venter's genome are associated with wet earwax, increased risk of antisocial behavior, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular diseases. This publication was especially interesting because it attempted to separate the two haplotypes (the two copies of each chromosome), although it only accomplished this in a limited way. The genome as published only had 3 billion bases, rather than the full 6 billion that would compose a fully diploid sequence. Another 10 years passed before the first haplotype-resolved human genomes began to appear.

On December 4, 2007, Venter gave the Dimbleby lecture for the BBC in London.

In 2006 Venter founded the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a nonprofit which conducts research in synthetic biology. It has facilities in La Jolla and in Rockville, Maryland and employs over 200 people.

In June 2005, Venter co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a firm dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce clean fuels and biochemicals. In July 2009, ExxonMobil announced a $600 million collaboration with Synthetic Genomics to research and develop next-generation biofuels. Venter continues to work on the creation of engineered diatomic microalgae for the production of biofuels.

After a brief marriage to Barbara Rae-Venter, with whom he had a son, Christopher, he married Claire M. Fraser remaining married to her until 2005. In late 2008 he married Heather Kowalski. They live in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, CA. Venter is an atheist.

The Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS) is an ocean exploration genome project with the goal of assessing the genetic diversity in marine microbial communities and to understand their role in nature's fundamental processes. Begun as a Sargasso Sea pilot sampling project in August 2003, Venter announced the full Expedition on 4 March 2004. The project, which used Venter's personal yacht, Sorcerer II, started in Halifax, Canada, circumnavigated the globe and returned to the U.S. in January 2006.

On May 16, 2004, Venter gave the commencement speech at Boston University.

Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002. According to his biography, Venter was fired because of a conflict with the main investor, Tony White, specifically barring him from attending the White House ceremony celebrating the achievement of sequencing the human genome.

In 2000, Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Public Genome Project jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome, a full three years ahead of the expected end of the Public Genome Program. The announcement was made along with U.S. President Bill Clinton, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network. On 15 February 2001, the Human Genome Project consortium published the first Human Genome in the journal Nature, followed one day later by a Celera publication in Science. Despite some claims that shotgun sequencing was in some ways less accurate than the clone-by-clone method chosen by the Human Genome Project, the technique became widely accepted by the scientific community.

Venter appears in the two-hour 2001 NOVA special, "Cracking the code of life".

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 1984.

Venter began his college education in 1969 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. Kaplan. He received a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry in 1972 and a Doctor of Philosophy in physiology and pharmacology in 1975 from UCSD.

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. He served from 1967 to 1968 at the Naval Support Activity Danang in Vietnam. While in Vietnam, he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind more than a mile out. 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.

John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biotechnologist and businessman. He is known for leading one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. and Synthetic Genomics. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In 2012, Venter was honored with Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.