The complicated legacy of J Craig Venter
By 
Philip Ball2026-05-05T13:34:00
By attempting to commercialise parts of the human genome, he sped up the development of gene sequencing technologies
Many obituaries for J Craig Venter, the biotech entrepreneur who died on 29 April aged 79, presented him as ‘controversial’ or as a ‘complicated man’. Such phrases are often euphemisms for a difficult personality – witness the obits for James Watson last year, with whom Venter has been compared for the contributions both men made to our understanding of the human genome.