Craig Venter made good on his promise that day on China Beach. In fact, he had made just about as big a stir as any scientist in the world could. But all of that was still more than 25 years down the road. Now, in 1968, after the Navy discharged him, his goals were modest. First, he wanted to get a college education, and then, if he was lucky, a decent-paying job. So he returned to Millbrae and applied to a community college in San Mateo. Because of his lousy high school grades, he didn’t think he could get in anywhere else, and he severely doubted he had the academic chops to succeed in a better school. But a couple of semesters later, he succeeded in transferring to the University of California, San Diego and put his academic career into high gear.
Venter’s original plan had been to become a doctor, the same as Art Levinson. He had already performed more surgeries in his ugly Da Nang Quonset hut as a combat Navy corpsman than some doctors performed after years working in the States. But while studying under Nathan O. Kaplan, a biochemist who had done historic work on cancer, he decided to go into research and up the ante of what constituted a life worth living. A doctor, he figured, assuming he was good, might save a few hundred lives in a lifetime. But a researcher could save the whole world, if he made the right breakthroughs.
And so in 1972, Venter landed a degree in biochemistry, and by 1975 had blown through his Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology. The question now was what to do next. He had the will—but how exactly was he supposed to go about saving the world?
He decided to skip the next step most students undertake in their academic careers: the postdoc. Instead he accepted an offer from the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was a junior faculty position, and a long way from the sunny shores of San Diego, but one takes what opportunities the universe supplies.
At Buffalo, Venter immediately made an impression on his colleagues—but not in a good way. He strode the academic corridors with a ragged beard and a ponytail of long, thinning hair, wearing bell-bottoms embossed with roses and outfits whose colors clashed so luridly they could induce a migraine.
To these quaint behaviors, Venter added his personal brand of unreserved bluntness. He had a habit of telling people precisely what he thought, no punches pulled, but seemed to be utterly clueless as to why anyone had a problem when the punches hit home. On his first day at the university, he was invited to sit in on a student’s defense of her thesis. The student was a favorite of the professor who invited him and he was clearly delighted with his star pupil. But that was lost on Venter, who upon being asked his opinion of the defense commented, “That was the most mediocre load of shit I’ve ever heard.”
Still, Venter was an avid and creative researcher. He continued the work he had begun under Nathan Kaplan in San Diego on how adrenaline affected the cells of the brain and body. If he could just find the gene related to the adrenaline receptor, maybe it would reveal how messages of all kinds were communicated in the brain. And if he could do that, perhaps he would someday fathom why humans behaved the way they did. Even humans like him.
But after several years at Buffalo, Venter grew frustrated. How could he ever truly make a difference? Where was the world-changing science? Then, in 1986, he and his second wife, Claire Fraser, also a scientist, landed appointments at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Neither of them wasted a minute moving to Maryland. Maybe at NIH he could at last find a way to make an impact.
As it turned out, he did.
Word was that a new and breathtaking concept was kicking around the scientific community, one that involved sequencing the entire human genome. Many considered the idea insane, far too ambitious. But there was scuttlebutt that the great James Watson was interested. Watson, together with Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin, had revealed the structure of DNA in 1953. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize; Franklin had died four years earlier and therefore was not included, even though her discovery of the DNA molecule in an x-ray she had taken was crucial to the work.8 Either way, their discovery marked one of the great scientific advancements of all time.
Since then, Watson had grown to become one of those statesman-scientists that often emerge after winning Nobels. He taught at Harvard and ran the legendary Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1965, he literally wrote the book on genetics, Molecular Biology of the Gene, which he followed three years later with one of the best-selling science books ever, The Double Helix.
It had taken 10 years of excruciating labor before Venter had finally nailed down an understanding of one stubborn protein—the adrenaline gene—and he knew as well as anyone that discovering the other hundreds of thousands out there was going to take a very long time. But he didn’t have time for progress that glacial. So if there was a new and quicker way to unlock the meaning behind every human gene, he wanted in.
Venter didn’t know it yet, but that undertaking was about to utterly change his life—and with it, the fundamental science needed to solve aging.