Inventing Himself.(The Last Word; Craig Venter)(Interview)

Byline: Fred Guterl

In what may be remembered as the age of biology, Craig Venter is the field's pre-eminent innovator. He startled the world by making rapid strides towards sequencing the DNA of a human genome at Celera Genomics. (His well-publicized race with Francis Collins, president of the National Human Genome Research Institute, ended in a gentlemen's tie when the two scientists and President Bill

Clinton heralded the project's completion in 2001.) Last week, Venter announced that his private institute had achieved another milestone: a far more complete sequencing of one man's genome -- his own. (The earlier genome was a composite of several different people.) Venter is hoping that his genome will be the first of thousands to join a database that could yield breakthroughs in preventative medicine. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Fred Guterl.

Guterl: What exactly did you accomplish?

Venter: THE previous effort only did half the job. What was sequenced was basically half the genome. It was naively assumed you could infer the other half from the first half, and now it's clear you cannot. At Celera, we used the same technique for decoding my own genome. When we'd assembled the five other people to make up a composite, what we got was not representative of what the human genome looks like. We had hints of that in 2000 or 2001, and it was always my interest in going back to it. Celera wasn't interested in that, so we did it in my institute.

What do the results tell you?

What we got this time was a diploid genome -- a genome that includes both sets of chromosomes from both my parents. We were surprised at how much variation between individuals there was.