J. Craig Venter, one of the lead scientists in sequencing the human genome and a pioneer of modern genomics, died on Wednesday, his research institute announced.He was 79.The J. Craig Venter Institute said in a statement on Wednesday that he died in San Diego after being hospitalized due to complications related to cancer.Venter was a revolutionary scientist who helped define modern genomics and consistently argued that scientific discovery should translate into “real-world impact,” his institute said. He also played a central role in launching the field of synthetic biology.AdvertisementAdvertisementVenter served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He later earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry and a PhD in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California, San Diego.His most influential work centered on genomics. Venter “helped move genomics from slow, gene-by-gene discovery to scalable data-driven science- and then helped take the next step: demonstrating that genomes could be designed and constructed.” his institute said.Venter led the effort to produce one of the first draft sequences of the human genome. He later published, with colleagues, the first “high-quality” diploid human genome, highlighting the importance of capturing genetic variation inherited from both parents.A human genome is a person’s complete set of genetic information, stored as DNA within the nucleus of nearly every cell in the body, according to the J. Craig Venter Institute.AdvertisementAdvertisementIn the 1990s, Venter and a team at the National Institutes of Health developed Expressed Sequence Tags, or ESTs, whi …
