An interview with J Craig Venter, the man who sequenced the human genome

Craig Venter has been a molecular-biology pioneer for two decades.

Art Streiber

J Craig Venter has been a molecular-biology pioneer for two decades. After developing expressed sequence tags in the 90s, he led the private effort to map the human genome, publishing the results in 2001. In 2010, the J Craig Venter Institute manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium, creating the first synthetic organism.

Now Venter, author of Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life, explains the coming era of discovery.

Wired: In Life at the Speed of Light, you argue that humankind is entering a new phase of evolution. How so?