1946-
Geneticist

Background.

Craig Venter graduated from high school in 1964, with the reputation of being a chronic discipline problem, and moved from San Francisco to Southern California to sail and surf. In 1967, when he was twenty-one, he went to Vietnam as a Navy hospital corpsman. Venter planned to become a doctor after the war and work in underdeveloped countries, but upon earning a Ph.D. in six years, he decided to go into in medical research. He married Claire Fraser, a molecular biologist, and the pair joined the National Institutes Health (NIH). Research. In the 1980s Venter was studying genes at the NIH when he came up with a new, faster way to decode DNA by feeding messenger RNA (mRNA), cop-ied into a more stable form known as cDNA, into an automated gene sequencer he had acquired for his labora-tory. When Venter published his first paper...