The Great Race.(Arts)(Craig Venter; genetic research)

Byline: Fred Guterl

Craig Venter recounts bucking the system to decode the human genome.

To what degree is Craig Venter a product of his age? It's hard not to ask this question in reading his memoir, "A Life Decoded: My Life, My Genome" (390 pages. Viking. $25.95). Venter is the maverick biologist who galvanized the genetics research establishment by triggering a race to decode the first human genome, the DNA instruction book present in each human cell. The battle, one of the most bitter and public in the history of science, ended in a kind of truce on June 26, 2000, with President Bill Clinton presiding over a press conference on the White House lawn. To the left of the podium sat Francis Collins, the consummate establishment scientist and head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health; to the right sat Venter, the loner. Petty carping had flared out of both camps before the meeting, and continue to this day; Venter's book is the latest salvo.

There's grist enough here for a hundred anger-management seminars. Venter lashes out at his many enemies, including Collins, who headed the plodding international effort that Venter challenged, the scientists who opposed him and even some of his corporate benefactors who he felt had betrayed his scientific ideals. Most of all, he criticizes the research establishment: the nine-month waiting period after a grant application, which makes it exceedingly difficult to do science at the cutting edge; the arbitrary way money is doled out; the political infighting. "Outright hostility and vitriol are not necessary to successfully kill a rival's grant application; one merely has to be lukewarm or offer faint praise," he writes. These criticisms sometimes seem small, but perhaps the moment called for somebody with Venter's particular DNA -- the intellect, the ego and the impatience to cut through the noise and get things done.

Venter is no ordinary academic genius. As a student, he was mediocre. "No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries," he writes. He showed a love of racing early on; as a child, he and his friends, riding bicycles, tried to outrun airplanes taking off from San Francisco airport. Drafted into the Navy during the Vietnam War, he scored a "respectable" 142 on an IQ test, good enough to join the medical corps. (He knew that medics were discharged quicker, but learned too late that it was because their survival rates were low.) One day, on a ...