GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN
Being a scientist means one must challenge existing dogma and authority, says J Craig Venter, a biotechnologist and geneticist who visited Beijing at the end of 2016 to receive the VCANBIO Award for International Cooperation in Life Sciences and Medicine.
Venter, 70, was one of the first to sequence the human genome, and the first to create what is called man-made life: insert a synthetic genome into the cell of a bacterium, whose original genome was destroyed.
Venter and his team put watermarks on the synthetic genome, and one of them was a quote from Irish writer James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to re-create life out of life.”
The first man-made cell survived and reproduced.
Now the Chinese version of his book Life at the Speed of Light is available in China.
The book, is based on a speech Venter gave in July 2012 at Trinity College, Dublin.
Venter’s speech was titled “What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell”, and his lecture was influential because “it confronted the central problems of biology — heredity and how organisms harness energy to maintain order — from a bold new perspective.
With clarity and conciseness he argued that life had to obey the laws of physics and, as a corollary, one could use the laws of physics to make important deductions about the nature of life.
Motivated and eager
Despite of being one of the leading scientists of the 21st century, Venter almost failed to graduate from high school.
Growing up in California, Venter had bad grades at school.
In high school, Venter’s only chance to succeed seemed to be swimming, and he might have competed in the Olympic Games if he was not drafted for the Vietnam War.
In Vietnam, Venter became a corpsman at a Navy hospital due to his high score in an IQ test. One of his tasks was to triage soldiers returning from battle, including the Tet Offensive, to decide who would live and who would die.
The job left him traumatized, and Venter decided to drown himself in the sea.
But as he swam, a shark prodded him and he changed his mind.
The experience in Vietnam influenced him in a lot ways.
For one thing, it convinced him to go back to school. “I decided that I definitely wanted a college education. I enjoyed the work I was doing in medicine so much that I was really interested in practicing it,” he says.
Another major influence of the experience in Vietnam is that “it made me unafraid to take risks and try to do things,” he says.
Venter would have stayed in the Navy, but he took a risk to go back to school.
Although a terrible student at high school and worried about starting college education from scratch, Venter was very motivated and eager to gain medical knowledge.
He went to college at 22, and in six years, he completed his PhD in physiology and pharmacology.
In 1976, he became a professor at the State University of New York, and in 1984, joined the National Institutes of Health.
Genome of life
Then, in order to sequence the genome, he started a nonprofit institute in 1992, and in 1995, the institute made a breakthrough, mapping the genetic code of a type of bacterium.
The way that Venter’s team sequenced the genome outpaced scientists from six countries including the United States, China and the United Kingdom, so in 1997 Venter was invited to join their program to sequence human genes.
In the previous seven years, the scientists had only sequenced about three percent of human genes but Venter used the next three years to complete 90 percent, and in 2000, Bill Clinton, the then US President, announced that the program had completed 99 percent of the sequencing of the human genome.
Then, in 2010, Venter and his team created the first man-made cell.
Meanwhile, the team are also developing a technology that will help to bring the genome of life from other planets to earth to replicate alien life.
For instance, Venter says that if life is found on Mars, which he is sure will happen, machines sent to Mars will be able to sequence the genome of life and send the data back to earth.
‘Big ego’
For years, Venter has been famous for his “big ego”, although one of his colleagues told The New York Times that, “He’s a very insecure person who compensates by coming across as very arrogant and aggressive. ”
“You need big ego to succeed,” says Venter, who has been challenging authority all his life.
“Scientists used to believe that proteins are the carriers of the genetic message … But the existing beliefs in science, each of them, should be challenged and abandoned. That’s what science should be about. It should challenge every aspect of what you’ve been told, ” he says.
If people are successful scientists, that does not mean they are smart about looking forward and coming up with ideas beyond their narrow space, he says.
Venter says such a misunderstanding about proteins and DNA set back science by half a century.
“Just imagine where we would be with the genetic code if we had started in 1900 and tried to understand the genome instead of just thinking that proteins were the genetic material.”
For him, the history of science is loaded with belief systems that ultimately get proved wrong.
“So the starting assumption of science should be that it is wrong.”
Without challenging or questioning, accepting the existing dogma will kill creativity, so most of the major breakthroughs in science have happened from people changing fields and working in a different place, he says.
Speaking about himself, Venter says: “I was a protein chemist. But I moved to molecular biology and made all these discoveries that the molecular biologists could not make because they believed it was impossible.”
The existing beliefs in science, each of them, should be challenged and abandoned. That’s what science should be about. It should challenge every aspect of what you’ve been told.” J Craig Venter, biotechnologist and geneticist 70, was one of the first to sequence the human genome, and the first to create what is called man-made life.