April 30, 2026—Pioneering genomic researcher J. Craig Venter has died—we do an overview of his career. Plus, a hailstorm kills an emu (sniff), and South Carolina's measles outbreak is declared over.
—Andrea Gawrylewski
Chief Newsletter Editor
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J. Craig Venter, the scientist who raced to decode the human genome, died yesterday at age 79. The J. Craig Venter Institute, a nonprofit research group he founded, said in a statement to media that he had been hospitalized after complications tied to cancer treatment.
Venter rose to fame in 1995 for publishing the first bacterial genome ever decoded, along with a list of gene annotations. He founded Celera Genomics in 1998 and refined a method to rapidly sequence different parts of the human genome at the same time, called whole-genome shotgun sequencing.
Human genome: In the late 90s, Venter raced against an international, U.S.-government-backed research group known as the Human Genome Project to complete the mapping of the human genome. In 2000, under pressure from then U.S.-president Bill Clinton, Venter agreed to present his data alongside the public research data, and the human genome project was declared completed in 2003 (in fact, 92 percent of the genome had been sequenced). Most of the rest of the genome was sequenced by 2021. At that time, Venter lamented that genetic sequence technology had not been sufficiently incorporated into modern medicine. “We all thought the genome sequence would allow us to understand ourselves and change medicine,” Venter wrote in an essay in Scientific American in 2021. “That is happening too slowly, costing tens of millions of lives that could have been saved if we made it a national priority.”
Visualizing the genome, the early years: In the horizontal bars below, each of the 22 numbered human chromosomes and two sex chromosomes (X, Y) are divided into regions (thin vertical stripes) of 1,000,000 bases or nucleotides. Different bar lengths reflect the chromosomes' varying physical length, as demonstrated by these chromosome-pair illustrations. Colors indicate regions that reached 50, 90 or 99 percent completion in each year. Check out the entire graphic to see how researchers completed the genome.
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Credit: Martin Krzywinski; Source: UCSC Genome Browser; “The Complete Sequence of a Human Genome,” by Sergey Nurk et al., in Science, Vol. 376; April 2022
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Other work over the years:
Algal fuel: Venter founded Synthetic Genomics in 2005, a company set on using genetically engineered algae to produce sustainable fuel. While the innovative idea led the company to research partnerships with global energy giants like ExxonMobil, the company recently lost funding and filed for bankruptcy in 2025. Synthetic genome: In 2010, Venter and his colleagues used a synthetic genome to build and operate a new, synthetic strain of Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria.
Human longevity: In his later career, he became more interested in longevity research, and in 2013 he co-founded Human Longevity, a venture dedicated to finding new ways to fight diseases linked to aging, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
da Vinci’s DNA: The Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, housed at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., brought scientists closer than ever to verifying Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA. (The artist’s burial site was disturbed in the 19th century, casting doubt on the veracity of the remains.) In January of this year, they announced that the project had recovered DNA from da Vinci’s Holy Child drawing, some of which may contain DNA from Leonardo himself.
Legacy: “J. Craig Venter was a swashbuckling, restless pioneer of genome sequencing and synthetic biology,” said Roger Highfield, science director of the Science Museum Group, a U.K. science museum consortium, in a statement. “Craig was a divisive figure but had huge chutzpah and was always driven on by the science. He was never going to win diplomat of the year, but he was always straightforward.”
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