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“Dare to make a difference,” urges genomics pioneer Venter
By Brian Fitzgerald
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J. Craig Venter: “Trust your instincts and blaze your own trail.” Photo by Albert L’Étoile |
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J. Craig Venter’s speech at BU’s 2004 Commencement featured a list of his “rules for living” — a bit surprising for a scientist and entrepreneur with a reputation as a rule breaker and a risk taker.
Venter, known as biology’s “bad boy,” has a set of rules? After all, “audacity might be your middle name” reads the citation to his honorary degree. This is a man who in his youth surfed the chilly waters of Half Moon Bay near San Francisco without a wetsuit. Venter’s zest for the unconventional continued in his 30s and 40s, as he developed a revolutionary strategy for decoding bits of genes: he isolated expressed gene tags, or ESTs, a process that eventually became the standard genomic discovery method. At 57, he is still the pushing the envelope, sailing around the world in a research vessel to gather new microbes and sequence their DNA.
What wasn’t surprising about Venter’s speech, however, was that his rules encourage graduates not to play by the rules — when necessary. “Believe in yourself and your ideas and be willing to take risks to achieve your goals,” he said. “It won’t be easy, but only with risk can we make substantial gains.”
Venter has been the subject of much scientific praise — along with criticism and resistance, especially in the late 1990s, when his team at Celera Genomics was in a public race with the largely government-funded Human Genome Project to decode the human genome. Both completed the work in 2000 and published their findings in 2001. Nonetheless, Venter’s famous challenge is credited with spurring the massive project to completion. “I was stunned by the negative reaction,” he said, “but history has shown my idea was a good one.”
Similarly, Venter’s message to more than 5,000 rain-splashed graduates and about 20,000 guests at Nickerson Field May 16 was to not accept the status quo. “Every day we are faced with the option of simply putting in our time, trudging to work and merely existing,” he said. “But if we all realize that we have a finite time here and every day could be your last, you might recognize that it’s important to do everything you can in your personal life and careers to make a difference, to make your life have meaning.”
His first rule: “Remain true to the child in you.” As a child he was a consummate explorer and builder. “I dissected frogs and whatever species I could find, and was always curious how things worked,” he said. With a sense of wonder, Venter delved into the study of adrenaline as an undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego, where he published his first paper, on adrenaline and how it works on the heart, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He chose science instead of medicine because of “the joy and pure ecstasy of scientific discovery.”
Rule number two: “Be a risk taker.” In 1991, while at the National Institutes of Health, Venter published a paper in the journal Science explaining his EST method, but his ideas were attacked by some genomic scientists, which made him realize he wouldn’t get NIH funding to expand his work. He was faced with a choice: stay at NIH and abandon his ideas, or leave the comfort and security of his prestigious position and follow his dream of driving forward the quest to sequence the human genome.
“Fortunately, I soon had a $70 million offer from an independent funding source to start my own not-for-profit research institute to test my ideas,” he said. “I jumped at the chance, knowing I had to take the risk because I wanted to have some say over my own destiny.” Isolating ESTs is now the principal gene discovery method used by scientists around the world.
Venter’s work has “been responsible for the explosion of sequence genomes, with close to 200 completed to date,” he said, “from dogs, mice, rats, monkeys, humans, insects, plants, and microbes. The method has universally reduced the time to decode a microbial genome from over 10 years, to now, a couple of hours.”
The third rule: “Trust your instincts and blaze your own trail.” He said that he has always believed in listening to his inner voice. “Being attacked on every front will challenge your resolve and will make you question your core of beliefs,” he said, “but it is especially important during these times that you remain certain in your convictions.”
He also challenged graduates to come up with new, creative, and interactive ways to teach science, “to find better ways to make science interesting and fun, so that more students will want to understand modern science or to seek out these areas as careers.”
Recent and future medical and scientific advances hold great promise, said Venter, but they are also fraught with ethical and social issues. “Healthy debate is good for society; however, it can only happen in a science-literate world,” he said. “Unfortunately, our leaders are woefully undereducated in science and medicine, and our children continue to lag in test scores in math and science.”
He also spoke about his latest project: an 18-month expedition to the Sargasso Sea to seek out and sequence the DNA of new microbes. In March, he published the result of the test project in Science. “The paper describes a minimum of 1,800 species, as well as over 1.2 million new genes; a significant increase in the overall public dataset,” he said. “Perhaps more importantly, we discovered 800 new photoreceptors, which indicate that most of the species in this part of the ocean derive their energy from sunlight — capture photons from the sun. This discovery alone is likely to change our views of basic metabolism, including carbon dioxide cycling in the ocean. It’s clear that while we look for life on Mars, we have little idea of who is on our own planet.”
Rule number four: “Live every day as if it might be your last.” Venter recalled his frenzied days as a medical corpsman during the Vietnam War as a “rude awakening” after being “drafted off my surfboard.” He resolved that when he got back to the United States, he “would get an education and attempt to make my life on the outside count for something.”
He admitted that his last rule, rule five, is a cliché: “Just do it.” He told the Class of 2004 not to accept disease, terrorism, atrocities, hunger, and poverty. “Use your knowledge, your curiosity, your energy,” he said. “Dare to make a difference.”
Venter concluded with a quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world, for indeed, that’s all who ever have.” He challenged each graduate to “be one of those people.”
28
May 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations