Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [64]
Venter describes himself as a natural risk-taker, ‘rebellious and disobedient’, endlessly curious, with an ‘insatiable urge to build things’. As a child he roamed free through his neighbourhood, built forts and soapbox racers, used lighter fuel to set fire to his plastic battleships and bought firecrackers to make them explode. His devil-may-care attitude survived into adulthood intact: the many exploits of his navy career include lying and cheating his way out of an unfair court martial. As a student he organised sit-ins and demonstrations. Venter happily admits to trying various drugs; nothing was off limits. Perhaps that is why he took to heart the advice of his scientific mentor, the biochemist Nathan Kaplan, who told him never to talk himself out of doing a ‘crazy’ experiment.
The encouragement, which came early in his career, stood Venter in good stead. It was this, after all, that persuaded him to try a gene-sequencing technique that everybody said would prove useless. As it turned out, the ‘dogma of the day’, as Venter described it, was wrong. His chosen technique, called expressed sequence tags, turned out to be a ‘very big winner’ and the beginning of the race towards sequencing the entire human genome. The story of the eventual publication of the human genome is a long and complex one, and is well described in Venter’s book and in James Shreeve’s The Genome War. But there are a couple of moments worth highlighting.
The first was when Venter gave away 38 million dollars’ worth of intellectual property. It happened as soon as he got the chance: in 1997 he managed to separate his company from Human Genome Sciences, who had provided much of his research funding in exchange for co-ownership of the gene data.
Scientists are often forced to go into business – by their universities or other institutions keen to capitalise on their investment. By and large, it is not a comfortable state of affairs: though having enough money to buy freedom for their research is important to them, accumulating wealth does not interest most successful scientists. As English doctor Thomas Browne said in the seventeenth century, ‘No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.’ Einstein expressed the scientist’s view with a typical simplicity: ‘Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.’
Venter, despite all that his critics had said about him, evidently felt the same. He wanted the freedom to work (and salaries for his staff), but beyond that it was all about discovery. As soon as his company had divorced itself from the moneylenders, and all of the genetic data that his work had revealed was his, he made the largest single deposit in GenBank, the publicly accessible database of genetic information. Many biologists working in the public sector rejoiced.
The second illuminating moment of Venter’s effort to sequence the genome demonstrates his desperate urge just to be able to get on with it – and let the consequences take care of themselves. The requirement for informed consent meant that Venter was faced with a six-month wait to start sequencing if he used other people’s DNA. Impatient and unencumbered by a need to follow the rules laid down by his company’s scientific advisory board – not to the letter, at least – Venter and his colleague Hamilton Smith kickstarted the project with their own DNA. They kept that as quiet as possible for as long as possible, because they knew it was far from ideal. ‘We could expect political attacks from our detractors if it became known that we had used our own DNA,’ Venter says.
Eventually, though, the secret leaked out. Venter’s company, Celera Genomics, said as little as they could about it. Although its board of scientific advisers expressed some disappointment that Venter had not played exactly by their rules, there was no expression of surprise. Even Venter’s competitors and detractors were largely unwilling to score points; despite Venter’s fears,