Craig Venter

Human Longevity, a company co-founded by Venter which he had left, sued the J. Craig Venter Institute, alleging that confidential information and trade secrets had been taken and employees recruited away. The complaint was widely interpreted as an attack on Venter, although he was not personally named as a defendant in the original filing.

A study led by Venter and Human Longevity claimed to be able to identify or reconstruct certain facial and appearance traits from the genome, with major implications for the anonymity of genetic data. Several geneticists considered the conclusions substantially overstated and emphasised that simple variables such as age, sex and ancestry accounted for much of the re-identification capability.

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In 2010, Venter's team created a bacterial cell controlled by a genome synthesised entirely through chemical methods. The announcement, sometimes presented as the creation of 'artificial life', prompted debate over environmental risks, biosafety and the possibility of producing dangerous organisms.

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Venter's Sorcerer II expedition collected and sequenced marine microorganisms in numerous countries. NGOs and certain governments accused the programme of 'biopiracy', fearing commercial appropriation of genetic resources collected in areas under national sovereignty. Permit difficulties were notably reported in French Polynesia and the Galápagos.

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A patent application linked to Venter's project to create a minimal synthetic organism triggered opposition from NGOs such as ETC Group, which viewed it as an attempt to monopolise fundamental synthetic biology technologies and cross an ethical boundary by patenting an artificial life form.

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Following publication of the human genome, leaders of the public consortium, including Eric Lander, argued that Celera's reported assembly had relied far more heavily on public data than the company's communications suggested and did not constitute sufficient independent validation of whole-genome shotgun sequencing.

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Craig Venter abruptly left the presidency of Celera in January 2002, a few months after publication of the human genome. His departure came as the company was gradually abandoning its genomic data-focused model to move towards drug discovery, and the press reported strategic differences with management.

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By creating Celera Genomics, Venter launched a private race to sequence the human genome faster than the public consortium, using a business model based partly on databases and intellectual property rights. Public-sector scientists and political officials feared that part of the genome would become inaccessible or that excessively broad patents would be filed.

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Science's decision to publish Celera's genome sequence triggered an editorial crisis over data access. Contrary to the usual standards requiring full deposit in public databases, Celera required access through its own website and imposed different conditions on academic and industrial users.

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Craig Venter's work on rapid sequencing of 'expressed sequence tags' led the NIH to file patent applications covering thousands of human gene fragments. The strategy triggered international controversy over whether sequences whose full function was unknown could be patented and the risk of obstructing research.

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