Craig Venter: True Revolution in Medicine

Craig Venter gets it.

He gets it.

I wish I had 5 minutes to talk to him. I dont. But we do have this ~21 min vid where he talks about some of the innovative things he and his crew are working on (phage therapy, faster ways to make influenza vaccines).

True Revolution in Medicine

 

(Im dissertation writing, posts will be sparse for the next couple of months- but to those of you sending me emails with 'hey, what about ___?' I will make sure to get to those!)

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Write on, Abbie!

So Venter's approach to speeding up vaccine delivery is to install a Star Trek replicator in every household?

I knew that Venter is someone who "gets it" way back when he set up his own group to compete with the Human Genome Project, which was taking way longer and costing way more than initially promised. While part of his reason for doing so was to prove his own sequencing method, his primary motivation was to HELP the HGP--by competing with them! He knew that monopolies grow complacent and if he lit a fire under their butt that would get them going. Competition is so often portrayed as adversarial, when it just doesn't have to be that way.

By Shane Killian (not verified) on 15 Apr 2013 #permalink

Shane, I suggest you read "A common thread" by John Sulston and Georgina Ferry.

Shane, I'm agreeing with Grant. Celera would never have been founded as a means to "help" the HGP - they wanted to patent the thing. What you've written doesn't make any sense. Who would back that venture when there would be no profitability?? The deliverable was the whole genome - if it were to be published openly, Celera would have no claim. To top it off, the way Celera was doing their shotgun sequencing: they seeded their attempts not only on their own work but also on the iterative releases from the public effort.

Ask former TIGR employees what they think of Craig Venter, and what he 'gets' .