A Vietnam veteran who earned a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego, he has been married and divorced twice and is now engaged. He has one child, a son, and lives in Alexandria, Va.
Venter attracted the ire of scientists and ethicists when, while working for the National Institutes of Health, he sought to patent some of the genes his lab discovered, Rabinow said: "This was one of the first questions about who owns life. Venter made a big splash."
Critics raised the same concerns when Celera sold access to the human genome, said Jim Thomas, a research manager with the ETC Group, a technology watchdog headquartered in Ottawa. "He's trying to make money off the human genome, but it belongs to the entire human race," Thomas said.
He left Celera in 2002 after the company's focus changed to drug development. He founded several organizations that merged in October 2006 to form the Rockville-based J. Craig Venter Institute.
In 2005, he declared his intention to work on a project formerly in the realm of science fiction - synthesizing life.
Rabinow said that synthetic organisms might help doctors combat drug-resistant microbes such as MRSA, which kill tens of thousands of people in the United States every year.
"Nature shifts and changes around readily and pretty adroitly. It's a very dangerous situation," he said. "So, what Venter's doing is leading us to perhaps a better understanding for how this works and maybe giving us a platform to counter it."
julie.scharper@baltsun.com
Sun reporter Chris Emery contributed to this article.
