Are you?
V: No, and that’s the ultimate irony. We’re doing the stuff and giving it to the world, and now it’s evil because all these poor little countries like Bermuda want to profit somehow from this data. They don’t realize that they can profit from the knowledge. I think people just like to attack what we’re doing because we’re always on the leading edge.
You’re also trying to create a new life-form in a test tube. Why?
V: That’s just one of my major personal projects. It’s driven out of just asking basic science questions. Creating a new life-form is a means of understanding the genome and understanding the gene sets. We don’t have enough scientists on the planet, enough money, and enough time using traditional methods to understand the millions of genes we’re uncovering. So we have to develop new approaches, and I think if we can build synthetic cells and substitute or insert whole cassettes of genes, we can try to understand empirically what the different genes do in developing living systems.
Isn’t that wildly ambitious?
V: It hasn’t been done yet. What we have done is synthesize a virus. That was pretty stunning. Viruses technically are not alive, but there is some stage that’s sort of in between inert and going through a living stage by hijacking the machinery of cells. We envision starting the same way with a synthetic chromosome. We’re going to start by injecting that into a cell whose chromosome we’ve killed to see if it could initially take over the machinery of that cell and go on from there. That may or may not work with living cells.
Your critics say it’s too complicated to build even the smallest bacterium, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of base pairs.
V: I don’t listen to the critics.
What makes you so successful?
V: I take risks. When I came back from Vietnam and was still alive, I was determined not to be afraid to take risks. And I think if anything has characterized the success I’ve had throughout my career, it’s that I’ve taken what most people would consider to be enormous risks. You know, when I left NIH, I was leaving guaranteed government employment and a reasonable research budget for the rest of my life.
How do you feel about the commercialization of biotechnology?
V: That’s why U.S. science is so far ahead of science in the rest of the world. We have companies like New England Biolabs that sell 5,000 different restriction enzymes, and they’ll give you a freezer and deliver them overnight. You go to Russia, you have to grow bacteria, isolate it, and purify it. So you spend six months doing that, and you can do only one experiment with it.
As you’re creating life and sequencing the planet’s genome, are you worried
about any dangers?
V: Science always has risks.
But you are creating life. What if something goes wrong?
V: Look, I won’t tell you that there are no dangers. That’s why this needs to be done out in the open, with careful people making sure mistakes won’t be made. If scientists as a group were intent on doing harm to society, most of society would probably be eliminated by now. And we don’t need molecular biology to do real damage—look at what has been done by blindly moving species around continents. So I wish science was moving faster. If science is going to play a role in solving some of our social problems and our problems with destroying our own environment, we need to do that pretty quickly so we have a chance of surviving as a species.
What do you think is most misrepresented about you?
V: I’ve had the bizarre situation where the government-funded scientists that I was competing with, instead of just competing scientifically with me, worked very hard to tarnish my personal reputation. It’s hard to understand that process. You know, even years later I still don’t get not only the fact that they did it but also that it was somehow accepted.
What’s the best thing about being Craig Venter?
V: Oh, wow. Well, he can actually get things done. You know, even though I’ve had wonderful teams to work with, I think the success of my career has shown other people that individuals can make a huge difference.
