Craig Venter obituary (opens in new tab)

Pioneering and controversial geneticist who was one of the first to sequence the human genome, in part by using his own DNAAt the international BioVision conference in Lyon in February 2001, the geneticist Craig Venter performed a remarkable piece of scientific barnstorming. Human beings possess far fewer genes than science had ever realised, he announced. We have about 30,000, far lower than previous estimates of 100,000.Such lack of heritable material showed people are not prisoners of thei...