craig venter sailboat

An epic travelogue, brimming with the excitement of discovery. With characteristic panache, Venter unveils the teeming array of bacteria, viruses, and eukaryotes that crowd our planet’s oceans. His research will undoubtedly shape our understanding of the global ecosystem for decades to come.

An exhilarating account of how creative science is accomplished. Few would guess just how many microbes live with us and how much they contribute to human health, both directly in our bodies and by making sure the air we breathe supports life. I have always loved bacteria, but after reading this I have an enhanced appreciation of their value to life on this planet. I highly recommend it.

The Voyage of Sorcerer II combines panoramic linguistic imagery with trenchant scientific insights to provide the reader a virtual seat aboard the most important ship of discovery since Darwin’s Beagle. Venter reveals to us why Earth should be called ‘Water’ and why the ocean’s microscopic life is our deepest and most magical reservoir of genetic diversity. This page-turner gives each of us the thrill of seeing our planet’s largest universe through the brilliant, intrepid eyes of the scientist who has done more than anyone to unlock the secrets of life.

A tour de force. Following in the paths of the Beagle and the Challenger, Venter has expanded biology’s horizons. This book explores microbial life on a global scale, providing cutting-edge solutions to problems of environmental change.

A fascinating inside look at Venter’s historic expeditions that makes the experiences, the analysis, and the transformative discoveries come alive.

We humans may think we are the most important species on Earth, but we’re actually just bit players in a far broader and more complex microbial world. In this exciting journey into that deeper world, Venter and Duncan expand our scope of what it means to be alive.

A ripping tale of how a sailing adventure and science can be combined to revolutionize our understanding of our bodies, the oceans, and the planet.

Microlands combines panoramic linguistic imagery with trenchant scientific insights to provide the reader a virtual seat aboard the most important ship of discovery since Darwin’s Beagle. Venter reveals to us why Earth should be called ‘Water’ and why the ocean’s microscopic life is our deepest and most magical reservoir of genetic diversity. This page-turner gives each of us the thrill of seeing our planet’s largest universe through the brilliant, intrepid eyes of the scientist who has done more than anyone to unlock the secrets of life.

After sequencing the human genome and embarking on a reimagining of his Institute and future research, J. Craig Venter, Ph.D. set upon a project combining his two loves: sailing and science. In 2004, after a successful pilot project where the DNA was collected and sequenced at the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series site, Dr. Venter and a team from his Institute launched the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition.

Inspired by 19th century sea voyages like Charles Darwin’s on the H.M.S. Beagle and Captain George Nares on the H.M.S. Challenger, the Sorcerer II circumnavigated the globe for more than two years, covering a staggering 32,000 nautical miles, visiting 23 different countries and island groups on four continents. The expedition continued for fifteen years, collecting tens of millions of marine microbes found in the global oceans and in the process has changed our understanding of this critical resource that sustains us.

In “The Voyage of Sorcerer II,” Dr. Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued: of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness microbial genomes to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction.

A captivating story of exploration and discovery, “The Voyage of Sorcerer II” restores microbes to their rightful place as crucial partners in our evolutionary past and guides to our future.

In “Microlands,” Dr. Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued: of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness microbial genomes to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction.

A captivating story of exploration and discovery, “Microlands” restores microbes to their rightful place as crucial partners in our evolutionary past and guides to our future.

• MarketPlace
• Digital Archives
• Order A Copy

Boat Focus: Sorcerer II

E xplorations of the globe under sail, like Darwin’s voyage aboard the ship Beagle and the voyage of the Royal Navy ship Challenger in the 1870s, were scientific milestones that greatly increased our knowledge of the planet. For biological scientist and lifelong sailor Dr. J. Craig Venter those passages provided a major inspiration for his extensive voyaging aboard his 95-foot sloop Sorcerer II . On two separate expeditions Venter, along with a group of fellow scientists and Sorcerer II ’s crew, gathered biological samples from the world’s oceans. Sorcerer II sailed more than 65,000 miles and harvested a vast biological trove that is being used to expand knowledge of the world’s biological organisms.  

In the 1990s, Venter and his team successfully sequenced the human genome in parallel with a government-funded effort. Venter also founded the biotech firms Celera Genomics, the Institute for Genomic Research  and the J. Craig Venter Institute.  

During a recent phone call Venter said that when he was serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War and stationed at a Navy facility in Da Nang, he often thought about sailing. “The idea of the sailing around the world helped keep me sane,” Venter said. When deciding to launch his first worldwide sampling expedition he realized he could combine his desire to do a circumnavigation with science. “A chance to do that and do my research at the same time was a phenomenal opportunity.” Venter and David Ewing Duncan have written a new book about the sampling expeditions called The Voyage of Sorcerer II published in September by Harvard University Press.  

Venter and crew collected samples every 200 miles by pumping 200 to 400 liters of seawater aboard and running it through a series of increasingly smaller filters designed to capture ever smaller denizens of the aquatic world. The filters with their specimens were then frozen on board and when Sorcerer II arrived at a port that had air freight service the frozen filters were airlifted back to Venter’s lab for analysis. The amount of data acquired was staggering. “We discovered more species on these voyages,” Venter said, “than the entire history of scientific discovery put together.”

During Venter’s research voyages, the boat — currently under different ownership, Venter sold it in 2019 — was equipped with a 300 horsepower 6CTA8 3M Cummins diesel with an adjustable pitch Max Prop propeller and fuel tankage of 2,324 gallons and water tankage of 634 gallons. Its fin keel has a draft of 10.2 feet. Even though a large boat Sorcerer II has manual cable steering. It was also equipped with bow and stern thrusters, water maker, two gensets and a host of other gear for crew comfort while conducting its research worldwide.

The tough hull of e-glass and Kevlar was well suited to the demands of many ocean miles. An excerpt from the Venter and Duncan’s book provides a glimpse of how Sorcerer II ’s captain viewed the vessel. “Sorcerer is not too big and not too small,” said Captain Charlie Howard, describing his vessel…. “She is smart and well put together with the best components and a lot of thought and engineering. She has long legs and once took us almost six thousand miles on one load of fuel from Cape Town to Antigua. She thrives on lots of attention and when you don’t give her the attention, she gives you surprises. She is a good friend when the going is rough, and she has never let me down.” n

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• Backchannel
• Newsletters
• WIRED Insider
• WIRED Consulting

James Shreeve

Craig Venter's Epic Voyage to Redefine the Origin of the Species

Picture this: You are standing at the edge of a lagoon on a South Pacific island. The nearest village is 20 miles away, reachable only by boat. The water is as clear as air. Overhead, white fairy terns hover and peep among the coconut trees. Perhaps 100 yards away, you see a man strolling in the shallows. He is bald, bearded, and buck naked. He stoops every once in a while to pick up a shell or examine something in the sand.

A lot of people wonder what happened to J. Craig Venter, the maverick biologist who a few years ago raced the US government to sequence the human genetic code. Well, you’ve found him. His pate is sunburned, and the beard is new since he graced the covers of Time and BusinessWeek . It makes him look younger and more relaxed - not that I ever saw him looking very tense, even when the genome race got ugly and his enemies were closing in. This afternoon, the only adversary he has to contend with is the occasional no-see-um nipping at some tender body part. "Nobody out here has ever heard of the human genome," he told me a week ago, when I first joined him in French Polynesia. "It’s great."

Venter is here not just to enjoy himself, though he has been doing plenty of that. What separates him from your average 58-year-old nude beachcomber is that he’s in the midst of a scientific enterprise as ambitious as anything he’s ever done. Leaving colleagues and rivals to comb through the finished human code in search of individual genes, he has decided to sequence the genome of Mother Earth.

What we think of as life on this planet is only the surface layer of a vast undiscovered world. The great majority of Earth’s species are bacteria and other microorganisms. They form the bottom of the food chain and orchestrate the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients through the ecosystem. They are the dark matter of life. They may also hold the key to generating a near-infinite amount of energy, developing powerful pharmaceuticals, and cleaning up the ecological messes our species has made. But we don’t really know what they can do, because we don’t even know what they are.

Venter wants to change that. He’s circling the globe in his luxury yacht the Sorcerer II on an expedition that updates the great scientific voyages of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably Charles Darwin’s journey aboard HMS Beagle . But instead of bagging his finds in bottles and gunnysacks, Venter is capturing their DNA on filter paper and shipping it to be sequenced and analyzed at his headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. The hope is to uncover tens or even hundreds of millions of new genes, an immense bolus of information on Earth’s biodiversity. In the process, he’s having a hell of a good time and getting a very good tan. "We’re talking about an unknown world of enormous importance," says Harvard biologist and writer E. O. Wilson, who serves on the scientific advisory board of the Sorcerer II expedition. "Venter is one of the first to get serious about exploring that world in its totality. This is a guy who thinks big and acts accordingly."

He certainly talks big. "We will be able to extrapolate about all life from this survey," Venter says. "This will put everything Darwin missed into context."

Emily Mullin

Steven Levy

Andy Greenberg

Jeremy White

For now, though, the expedition has run aground, snagged on an unanticipated political reef here in French-controlled waters. But it may all work out tomorrow. Right now, the sun is just beginning to soften toward sunset, and a gentle breeze is rustling the palms. Venter has disappeared in the direction of the boat, and one of his crew members, wearing a Sorcerer II T-shirt over her bathing suit, is waving me back. Must be close to dinnertime.

The last time I spent a few days with Venter on his yacht was in 2002 on St. Barts. He was in a much darker mood. He had just been fired as head of Celera Genomics and was hiding out in the Caribbean, licking his wounds. He had started the company four years before to prove that a technique called whole-genome shotgun sequencing could determine the identity and order of all DNA code in a human cell and do it much faster than the conventional method favored by the government-funded Human Genome Project. He had already made science history by using his technique to uncover the first genome of a bacterium, but most people doubted it would work on something as large and complicated as a human being. Undaunted, he pushed ahead, informing the leaders of the government program that they should just leave the human genome to him and sequence the mouse instead.

Venter also promised that he would give away the basic human code for free. Celera would make money by selling access to gobs of additional genomic information and the powerful bioinformatics software tools needed to interpret it. His critics claimed that he was trying to have it both ways, taking credit for providing the world with the code to human life and reaping profits for his shareholders at the same time. Venter cheerfully agreed.

Things didn’t quite go according to plan. His gambit did indeed accelerate the pace of human DNA sequencing, and the shotgun approach has now become the standard method of decoding genomes. But galled by the effrontery of Venter’s challenge, the Human Genome Project scientists closed ranks and ramped up their efforts quickly enough to offer a draft of the genome almost as fast as Celera’s nine-month sprint. In June 2000, the increasingly bitter race came to an end in a politically manufactured tie celebrated at the White House. The détente with the public-program scientists lasted about as long as it takes to pack up a camera crew. And by that summer, Celera, once king of the startup biotech sector, had already begun a long sad slide into the stock-price cellar and corporate obscurity. "My greatest success is that I managed to get hated by both worlds," Venter told me on St. Barts.

I didn’t see much of him after that. I was finishing a book about the genome race, during which he had given me access to Celera. But I had plenty of material by then and needed some distance from his inexhaustible, often exhausting ego. (As is true for many highly successful people, it was all about him.) I knew his funk would not last very long. Life was too short, and the thrill of accomplishment too powerful a drug for him. Using $100 million from Celera and other stock holdings, he started a nonprofit, the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, that would free him to do any kind of science he wanted without obligation to an academic review panel or a corporate bottom line. In 2002, the foundation launched the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Maryland.

At the top of his to-do list: Create life from scratch, splicing artificial DNA sequences to build a functioning synthetic genome then inserting it into a cell. The ultimate goal would be to endow this man-made organism with the genes to perform some specific environmental task - gobble carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, say, or produce hydrogen for fuel cells. Last November, Venter announced that his IBEA team, led by Nobelist Hamilton Smith, had successfully constructed a functioning virus molecule out of 5,386 DNA base pairs in a mere two weeks. "Nothing short of amazing," said US secretary of energy Spencer Abraham, whose agency funded the work.

To me, the press conference hoopla had a tinny ring. Another team at SUNY Stony Brook had manufactured a larger virus a year earlier, albeit using a technique that had taken three years. But viral genomes are much smaller than those of truly living organisms - a mere few thousand base pairs, compared with hundreds of thousands in the smallest genome of a bacterium. Most scientists doubted that Venter and his colleagues, or anyone else, could build a genome that big from scratch and get it to work in a cell. Venter was saying he could do it in three to five years.

Venter resurfaced in the news early this year with a more substantial, if less sensational, announcement. By applying the whole-genome shotgun method to an entire ecosystem instead of to an individual genome, he had conducted a study of microbial diversity in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda. Known to have a low concentration of nutrients, the Sargasso was also assumed to harbor relatively few microorganisms. But instead of an ocean desert, Venter found an abundant and varied soup of microbes wherever he sampled the seawater. In March, he announced that his Sargasso team had discovered at least 1,800 new species and more than 1.2 million new genes. Conservatively speaking, that doubled the number of genes previously known from all species in the world. This code was to be made available on GenBank, a public genetic database, for researchers everywhere to use with no strings attached. Included were almost 800 new genes involved in converting sunlight into cellular energy. As a kicker, Venter also revealed that the Sargasso trip was only a pilot project for a vastly more ambitious undertaking: His yacht the Sorcerer II was at that moment in the Galépagos Islands, embarked on a two-year, round-the-world expedition that promised to overwhelm the huge amount of data from the Sargasso Sea.

A few days later we were talking about how I might join him for a segment of the trip through French Polynesia. "I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet," he said, matter-of-factly. I wasn’t sure what that meant - how can anybody find all the genes in the world? How would you use all that raw material when there was already more information in the world’s genetic databases than anyone knew what to do with? But I had never been to the South Pacific, and the names of the places where the boat planned to take samples - Hiva Oa, Takapoto, Fakarava - sounded like the tinkling of shells. I figured it was time to reconnect.

When I return to the Sorcerer II for dinner, Venter is dressed in the blue Speedo he’s been wearing most of the time I’ve been down here. He’s checking email on one of the boat’s five computers (not counting the litter of laptops in the main cabin). Charlie Howard, the Sorcerer II ’s captain, is relaxing on deck, as much as he ever relaxes. I remember him from St. Barts. In his previous life, Howard was an electrical engineer in Toronto. Then he decided to take a year off and sail to the Caribbean, and when the year was over he couldn’t think of a good reason to go back. He is 47 now and has been living on boats more or less his whole adult life. Venter can get off the boat anytime and fly back to the States to conduct business, then rejoin the crew later. If Howard were to leave, the expedition would stop.

We are on Rangiroa, the largest of many atolls in the Tuamotu Islands, 200 miles northeast of Tahiti. It consists of a low and thin broken ring of beach and vegetation surrounding a huge lagoon. Darwin sailed through the Tuamotus on the Beagle in 1835, marveling at how islands just barely above the sea managed not to be swept away by the ferocious Pacific. More than a half century earlier, Captain James Cook’s HMS Endeavour sighted land here after an open-water passage of 5,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego. "I’m in awe of Cook," Howard says. "Imagine sailing through these islands at night. Nothing but the sound of the surf to let you know you might be in trouble up ahead. That would be scary stuff."

Among those aboard the Endeavour was a young man named Joseph Banks, a member of the Royal Society and "a Gentleman of Large Fortune, well versed in Natural History," according to British Navy records. At 25, Banks was just a few years older than Darwin was when he made his voyage on the Beagle - eager, handsome, and by all accounts a very personable fellow. He got along particularly well with the native women he encountered during the Endeavour ’s subsequent languid stay in Tahiti.

Banks had paid-10,000 - the equivalent of about $1 million today - for the privilege of joining Cook’s expedition. His aim was to collect and describe every plant, animal, fish, and bird he could lay his hands on. Just three days out of Plymouth, England, he noted the presence of "a very minute sea Insect" in some water taken on board to season a cask. But most of Banks’ descriptions, like Darwin’s, were of the larger life-forms he shot from the sky, netted from the ocean, or uprooted from the ground. A decade earlier, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had estimated the total number of plant and animal species on Earth to be no more than about 12,000; Banks and his team (including a student who had worked under Linnaeus) recorded some 2,500 new ones on the Endeavour ’s three-year voyage alone. On his return home, he was the toast of all England, adored by the press and a frequent visitor of the king.

Like Banks and Darwin, Venter believes his circumnavigation will greatly increase the number of known species. Of course, his methods and equipment are vastly more sophisticated. But the world he’s exploring is also much more obscure than the one they studied. Scientists estimate that the microbial species identified so far account for less than 1 percent of the total number on Earth. Even under a microscope, the simple shape of microorganisms - rods and spheres, for the most part - makes it difficult to use morphology to describe and classify them, as Banks and Darwin were able to do with the animals and plants they collected. Finally, most microbes do not reproduce sexually, but some do swap genes across species lines, confounding the very notion of "species" in this teeming context.

All this has led to a skewed view of Earth’s biodiversity. People think of insects as the most numerous organisms. Split open any single insect and hundreds of thousands of microbes will tumble out. Billions live in a handful of soil in your garden or in that gulp of seawater you coughed up at the beach last summer. Yet of the roughly 1.7 million plant and animal species so far named and described, only some 6,000 are microbes - all of which have been cultured. The true number out there may be closer to 10 million. Or perhaps 100 million. Nobody really knows. "Imagine if our entire understanding of biology was based on a visit to the zoo," says Norman Pace of the University of Colorado, Boulder. "That’s where we’ve been in microbiology."

Over the past 30 years, Pace has led a generation of microbiologists who use gene sequences instead of morphology and behavior to identify and classify species. This approach does not require culturing the bugs in a petri dish - you just isolate the right bit of DNA using standard molecular biology. Some "housekeeping" genes are so essential to the maintenance of life that they can be found throughout the living world with the order of their DNA letters more or less intact. But over time, small changes do crop up through harmless mutations. Thus, a very close match in the order of letters in such a gene implies a close relationship between two species; a less similar match, a more distant relationship. By combining all such comparisons, you can construct a whole phylogeny of the known microbial world. It is very much a work in progress. In 1987, the first such family tree, constructed by Carl Woese at the University of Illinois, identified 12 phylogenetic divisions. Now there are about 80.

One gene in particular, called 16S rRNA, has become a workhorse for identifying and classifying microbes. Every species, from the lowliest bacteria to humans, has one and only one 16S rRNA gene. Extract the DNA from some seawater or soil and count the number of different 16S genes, and you have at least a general idea of how many microbial species there are in the sample. Compare the DNA sequences of those genes, one to another, and you have a notion of their family relationships as well. Venter would have pleased the microbiologists by going to the Sargasso Sea and looking for 16S rRNA genes or zooming in on some other target. But zooming in is not his style. He likes to zoom out. "My theme has always been randomness and random sampling," Venter says. "Every time, people have said it was the wrong way to go about it. And every time, I’ve made major contributions."

Venter’s approach is to take all the DNA from all the microbes he found in the Sargasso Sea at any given location and smash it into bits. He then tries to assemble the pieces into complete genomes, applying the same whole-genome shotgun assembly method he relied on when he conquered the human genome. The computer algorithms he uses are in fact those developed at Celera, though somewhat more refined. The target, however, is very different: Instead of one huge genome, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, there are thousands of tiny puzzles, with no guide to tell which piece belongs in which puzzle.

The results from the Sargasso samples surprised Venter. Since the microbial population was so diverse, it was harder for the algorithms to figure out whose DNA was whose and to bundle the fragments neatly into whole genomes. It turned out that only two organisms’ genetic codes were represented in their entirety - far fewer than Venter had anticipated. The study also cast serious doubt on the whole idea of comparing 16S rRNA genes to determine the number of species in a sample. Two assembled sections occasionally contained identical 16S rRNA genes, but the stretches of DNA surrounding the genes would be much too divergent to lump both assemblies into one species. Venter’s study made it look like the 16S rRNA approach was analogous to classifying mammals by comparing just their noses. On the other hand, without a lot more sequences fed into the equation - prohibitively expensive because of the cost of running sequencers - the shotgun assembly approach wasn’t able to get a handle on the number of species, either. There appeared to be a minimum of 1,800, but there could be tens of thousands, depending on what assumptions the computational biologists on Venter’s team used. "What Craig did was like grabbing a cubic mile of Amazon rain forest and trying to sequence the whole thing," says Pace. "He shouldn’t be surprised that it was really complex. Anybody who would do that doesn’t have a good concept of a scientific question."

Venter might have answered his critics with a targeted follow-up study of the Sargasso Sea. Instead he decided to sequence the world. "There’s an infinite number of questions you could ask," he says. "We’re just trying to figure out who fucking lives out there."

The Sorcerer II expedition began last August in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Venter chose the departure point partly because another famous scientific expedition - the voyage of HMS Challenger - had visited Halifax in 1873, and partly, he concedes, because he had never sailed that far north and wanted to see what it was like. The Sorcerer II then headed to the Gulf of Maine, continuing down the coast to Narragansett Bay and Chesapeake Bay, passing Cape Hatteras, and cutting around Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal and south to the Cocos and Galépagos islands.

About every 200 miles, the crew has been taking water samples. Jeff Hoffman, aka Science Boy, oversees the work and doubles as a deckhand. He is 31, has an easy southern manner, and is all but done with a doctorate in microbiology from Lousiana State University. His long, pleasant face is made longer by a goatee that has been sprouting since the expedition got under way. While taking time off from his studies, he was just hanging out and skiing with buddies in Colorado when he got a job interview at IBEA. The fact that Hoffman was a competitive swimmer especially intrigued Venter, who had been one himself. Now Hoffman is sailing around the world. "My dad says I’m the only guy he knows who can fall in a pile of shit and come out smelling like roses," he says.

When sampling, Hoffman records the latitude and longitude of a site, along with temperature, salinity, pH, pressure, wind speed, and wave height. Seawater, usually from a depth of about 5 feet, is pumped into a large plastic barrel on board and piped through a cascade of filters mounted in gleaming stainless steel casings in the aft cockpit (see "How to Hunt Microbes," page 111). The filtering process takes up to five hours, including setup and cleanup; during downtime, Hoffman listens to his iPod or lifts weights.

When all the water has passed through, he carefully uses tweezers to remove the filters, then bags them. The bags are labeled, frozen, and periodically sent back to his colleagues in Rockville to be analyzed. Sometimes Hoffman scrawls a personal note on the label, like Send burritos or We’re out of Jack Daniels . The color of the used filter papers changes depending on what’s on them. The ocean is hardly one big homogeneous soup. Just by looking at these filters - some seem barely stained, others look like they’ve been dipped in pond scum - you can see there is a lot of variation in the microbial populations from one spot to another. The ones from Halifax Harbor look like they’ve been used for toilet paper, which in a sense they have, since Halifax is one of the largest harbors in the world without a comprehensive sewage treatment system.

Some of the most spectacular sampling came during two weeks in the Galépagos, islands that became famous for Darwin’s sojourn there, as well as for the varieties of finches, mockingbirds, tortoises, and marine iguanas that did so much to buttress Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Venter conceived of his expedition as following in Darwin’s footsteps, and now he was sailing into the same bays and trudging up the same rocky paths as the great man himself. He had organized the visit well ahead with scientists at the Charles Darwin Research Station on the island of Santa Cruz to ensure sampling in the most productive spots; these included several unusual environments, each likely to contain a unique spectrum of microbial life, with differing metabolic pathways and hence different sets of genes. In several locations, they took soil samples to supplement the water specimens.

Getting those samples from the top of Wolf Island was a separate adventure. It required four crew members to leap onto a sheer rock face from a dinghy surging on 7-foot-tall surf, while Howard fought to keep the boat from crashing into the cliff. They picked their way up the slope wherever they could find a foothold, navigating around the famously unafraid frigate birds and boobies and trying especially to avoid the babies pecking at their hands and feet. All this in roasting heat. "It was a pretty intense climb," Hoffman tells me. "We were all sweating our asses off." On the return trip, he and another climber flung themselves off the cliff face into the cool water 30 feet below.

Venter’s expedition also took samples from mangrove swamps, iguana nesting areas, and interior lakes. The team obtained a promising sample directly from a sulfur vent bubbling up from the seafloor off another chunk of rock called Roca Redonda. Venter and Brooke Dill, the expedition’s diving master, plunged 60 feet underwater with the sampling hose, struggling not to be swept away or battered against the rocks by the swirling currents. Sea lions danced overhead. To get a sample from a flamingo-dotted pond on the island of Floreana, Venter, Hoffman, and others lugged 13-gallon carboys over a hill to be loaded onto the boat. It was worth it. The 100-degree water was so full of life that the filters clogged up after only 3 gallons of water had passed through.

A week after my trip, I caught up with the Galépagos samples at IBEA in Rockville, where molecular biologist Cyndi Pfannkoch, who runs the DNA prep facility, took me through the extraction process. The filter papers are first cut into tiny pieces and placed into a buffer that cracks open the cell walls of the organisms, spilling their contents. Chemicals are added to chew up proteins and leave just the DNA, which is spun out of the solution. Pfannkoch pulled a vial from a rack and held it up to the light. "See that white glob down there?" she said. "That’s DNA from the flamingo pond. Compared to a typical sample, this is huge . I can’t wait to see what’s in it."

On our way out the door to visit the lab where the DNA is sequenced, Pfannkoch opened a huge freezer; stored inside at -112 degrees Fahrenheit were Hoffman’s labeled pouches. She took out a bag and rubbed the thick layer of frost off the label with a finger. In addition to the ID, it read: Panamanian women are hot .

When the boat was five days out from the Galépagos, a shrieking alarm warned that the engine was dangerously overheating. Howard rushed below and found that the belt driving the alternator and water pump had shredded. In preparation for just these incidents, he had squirreled away spare parts behind every floor and ceiling panel, and he replaced the belt easily. But a day later that one blew, too. Howard dug into the problem and discovered that a couple of ball bearings had self-destructed in the pulley holding the belt. That was one part with no spare. To make things worse, the ship was about to enter the Pacific doldrums, and it might have taken weeks to reach Polynesia under sail. "When you hear Charlie yelling, ’Oh, shit!’ that’s not good," Hoffman says. "The guy is MacGyver." Howard cursed some more, thought for a while, then rigged up a workaround by cannibalizing some bearings from a less crucial pulley. He wasn’t sure if it would hold 10 minutes or 10 hours. It’s a couple of weeks later now, and the engine is still running on the fix.

Then there are the political obstacles. Marine research is governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which outlines what one country must do when undertaking science in another’s territorial waters. If you’re talking about garden-variety oceanographic research, obtaining permission is usually easy. But the unprecedented scale of this genetic dredging project - We’re going to sequence everything we find! - would raise a few red flags even if its leader were not J. Craig Venter. And the obstacles are higher since many people are still certain that "Darth Venter" tried to privatize the human genome, allowing access to the code only to the deep pockets who could afford it.

This time around, he’s doing everything he can to convince the world that he has no commercial motive: Here, take it all, I ask for nothing in return. His generosity has actually exacerbated his political problems. By the nature of its research, the Sorcerer II expedition falls under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which has established guidelines for "benefit sharing" of resources. In return for access to their waters, in other words, governments expect a piece of the action. But if - like Venter - you are giving everything away, you don’t have any benefits to share. "The irony is just too great," he says. "I’m getting attacked for putting data in the public domain."

The expedition has also come under assault by activists. On March 11, while the Sorcerer II was in the Galépagos, the Canada-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration issued a press release titled "Playing God in the Galépagos."

"J. Craig Venter, the genomics mogul and scientific wizard who recently created a unique living organism from scratch in a matter of days, is searching for pay dirt in biodiversity-rich marine environments around the world," it reads. While Venter might have promised not to patent the raw microbes he found, the environmentalists’ argument went, he or someone else could genetically modify them, then claim patents on the engineered life-forms. Whatever he was doing, the ETC Group saw it as an immediate international concern. The release also cited Accién Ecolégica, which accused Venter of pirating Ecuador’s resources, because his permits to export samples from the Galépagos were not properly authorized.

The day after the near-disaster with the alternator pulley, Venter was immediately notified by Rockville of a fax from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs politely informing him that his application to conduct research in French Polynesia was denied. The ministry understood that the Sorcerer II ’s mission was to collect and study microorganisms that might prove helpful for health and industry, but France wished to protect its "patrimony" by restricting "extraction of these resources by foreign vessels." "It’s French water, so I guess they’re French microbes," Venter told me when he got the news. (The Sorcerer II ’s communications technology is high-end for boats twice its size, and a phone call from the middle of the Pacific to my home in New Jersey was no big deal.)

He didn’t sound too worried. He had already enlisted the French ambassador to the US to lobby Paris on his behalf, and some top French scientists were writing letters of protest to the ministry. But when the Sorcerer II reached the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas archipelago, the port captain there informed Venter and Howard that their vessel was not allowed to leave the harbor. Impounding a private foreign vessel merely on suspicion is against international law, and Venter protested to the US State Department, which informed the ministry that it considered the act a violation of the honor of the United States. The Sorcerer II was allowed to proceed as a normal tourist vessel, but with a warning not to attempt to take any samples.

After three weeks, a formal convention was drawn up and signed by Venter and the French Polynesian administrator overseeing research. The president of French Polynesia would also need to sign the document, but this was a mere formality. Sampling could begin at any moment.

A few days later, I meet up with Venter at the InterContinental Beachcomber Resort in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia. Decades of commercial and industrial growth have taken the paradise out of the Tahiti that Banks sailed into aboard the Endeavour back in 1769, but the InterContinental has trucked a little of it back in. The vibrant gardens beneath my balcony give way to an azure pool surrounded by a beach of pure, imported white sand, beyond which lies the lagoon. Half a mile out, the waves break on the reef. Nine miles away, the island of Moorea springs up from the sea, its jagged green peaks bundled in thunderclouds. After dinner, we take in the hotel’s Tahitian dance show. The women sway and wave their arms, and the men lunge about, slapping their arms and fluttering their knees and uttering sudden loud testosterone-fueled barks in unison. This is the otea - originally a war dance - and at times it seems the men are about to leap into their pirogues and invade Moorea. The next morning I notice that the bellhop loading our bags into the car looks familiar. He was one of the dancers.

By this point, the Sorcerer II has been released from its political shackles on Hiva Oa and has proceeded westward to the Tuamotus. We fly out to meet the boat at Rangiroa. As we come in for a landing, I can see it anchored just inside the lagoon, sleek and white, decks shining in the sun.

We are met at the airport by Howard and Juan Enriquez, a friend of Venter’s for about 10 years. In the early 1990s, Enriquez, whose mother is a Boston Cabot, was head of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation and deeply immersed in Mexican national politics. Since meeting Venter, he has become an enthusiastic teacher, writer, and promoter of genomic science and enterprise - a sort of freelance genomophile. He spent two years as a senior research fellow and founding director of the Life Science Project at Harvard Business School and is currently the CEO of Biotechonomy, a life sciences venture capital firm. He has been traveling with the expedition for more than a month. "I gave up a lot for this," Enriquez tells me as we motor out to the Sorcerer II in a dinghy. "I canceled a meeting with Bush and blew off a couple of foreign ministers. But what could be more exciting than sailing around the world, discovering thousands of new species?"

We’re greeted on deck by Hoffman and first mate/second engineer Cyrus Foote, both barefoot and stripped to the waist.

"We mooned the plane as you flew over," Hoffman tells Venter.

"I’m not sorry I missed that," he replies and goes below to confer with Howard and change into his blue Speedo.

I stay on deck and Enriquez gives his take on the permit issue. He’s philosophical about it, seeing it as part of the history of civilization. His theme is information. When humans invented cave art, they gained an enormous advantage over other animals because they were able to convey information about things that were not actually present. The next major step was the invention of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a way of standardizing information. Then came the much more efficient 26-letter alphabet, then, in the 1950s and ’60s, the two-letter alphabet of binary code. Now, he says, the four-letter code of the genetic script - A, C, T, and G - is driving another revolution. Through the application of genomics, an acre of land once used to produce food, feed, or fiber will be used to produce medicine out of plants, and microbes from the ocean will be recruited to make free energy.

This puts a whole new spin on things. "The world is going genomic," Enriquez says. "If you do not perceive the possibilities in this shift, if you say no instead of yes , you will be left in the past. There will be whole societies who end up serving mai tais on the beach because they don’t understand this." Including the French, unless they get their act together and allow the Sorcerer II and projects like it to go forward. "What you’re watching right now with the permit issue is almost a mirror image of what happened in the digital age," he says. "With Minitel, France had the Internet wired to every house 10 years before anybody else. But instead of having an entrepreneurial system that said yes, they had a closed system that said no, you can’t do this, you must use French software, we’ll tax your stock options. And now Finland is beating the shit out of France in the digital revolution."

While Enriquez goes to shore to arrange a diving expedition, Howard shows me around the boat, pointing out the changes that have been made to convert a luxury yacht into a research vessel that looks and feels pretty much like a luxury yacht. One of the most obvious adjustments is the lab bench set up in the library next to the galley; it includes a $35,000 fluorescent microscope hooked up to a 42-inch plasma videoscreen on the wall (also useful for watching movies). At 95 feet long, Howard says, the Sorcerer II is almost exactly the size of the Endeavour . But where Cook’s vessel was made of wood, hemp, and pine tar, Venter’s is fabricated from foam core, epoxy resin, and carbon fiber. The Sorcerer II ’s aerodynamic hull is essentially that of a modern racing yacht, while the Endeavour ’s was a "huge bulbous box with square ends," Howard says. Cook navigated by the stars and measured water depth with a knotted rope. Venter has bottom-imaging sonar and assorted other navigational aids, including digitized charts with GPS. We have 10 people on board, all of whom have a reasonable expectation of returning home alive. Of the 94 who left England aboard the Endeavour , some 40 died en route, including most of Banks’ retinue of artists, fellow naturalists, and servants.

Howard introduces me to the rest of the crew. Maybe it’s all the tanned flesh and tight stomachs, but they seem to radiate physical competence, moving fluidly about the deck as if they are genetically adapted to this microenvironment. Foote, the youngest at 26, has spent most of his life on the water, except for a stint as a graphic designer in Manhattan. A skilled sailor, he’s also an expert surfer and free diver. (On a recent dive, five sea urchin spines pierced his hand. He knew enough not to try to pull out the barbed spines, calmly pushing them through the other side of his hand instead.) Tess Sapia, the cook, has been working on boats in one capacity or another since leaving her native California; she has a captain’s license. Dill, the diving master, joined the Sorcerer II with Foote in Newport, Rhode Island, serving also as marine naturalist and deckhand. Stewardess and deckhand Wendy Ducker just joined the crew in the Galépagos. Years ago she worked as an advertising art director in San Francisco. But that was before her resort job in Zimbabwe, which involved skydiving, white-water rafting, safari walking, and bungee jumping off the Victoria Falls bridge. She then spent a couple of months backpacking through Brazil. She was learning to surf in the Dominican Republic when Howard contacted her about this job. "I wanted to do a circumnavigation and was looking for adventure," she tells me, as if she’d been sacking groceries up to that point.

When I wake up the next day, Venter is in the main cabin reading an email from his office; Howard leans over his shoulder. Dill is setting the table for breakfast. "So the big news this morning is your friends the French are going to send a gunboat out to escort us," he tells me. (I’m not quite sure why he calls them my friends, but it could have to do with an incident in a bar on St. Barts that I’d rather forget.) "They want to make sure we sample where we said we would. We’re not supposed to tell the State Department about this. It might put a chill on French-American relations. Being as how they’re so cozy right now and all," Dill says.

"They’d like to know if we’d like to invite an officer on board, too," Venter says. "How do you say ’fuck you’ in French?"

Everybody gathers, and Sapia serves breakfast: bacon, fruit, and "freedom toast." I sneak a peek at the email. It’s a bit less dramatic than Venter made out - for instance, it says vessel , not gunboat - but the gist is about right. All that’s needed to begin sampling is the president’s signature - except that the signed document then has to be faxed to Paris for confirmation, and Easter weekend is approaching, with Monday being a French holiday in short, sampling probably won’t start until Wednesday, or even Thursday - when I’m scheduled to go home.

The next morning, just off Rangiroa, I look around the edge of the lagoon we’re anchored in. I don’t see any gunboats.

"Why don’t we just take some samples and throw them away if permission doesn’t come through?" I ask Howard.

"Because if they caught us, they could impound the boat," he says. "Take the crew off. Cancel the expedition. This is serious stuff."

Nobody else seems impatient, least of all Venter, and gradually the sun and heat and breathless beauty of the place begin to blunt my own sense of urgency. Enriquez organizes an excursion to a nearby reef so rich with sea life they call it the Aquarium. The next day we drift-snorkel from the ocean to the lagoon. Sharks and fish abound. Over here’s a manta ray. Down there, a Napoleon wrasse, like a great rainbow-colored bus. Foote circles below me for two minutes at a time on a single breath of air. "He’s a marine animal," says Dill. Later, Enriquez and I take the dinghy into the sleepy town to get some food coloring to dye eggs for an Easter egg hunt. The shops don’t have any food coloring, or any eggs for that matter. I read Banks’ journal from the Endeavour . At night we watch movies on the big plasma screen. There’s a card game. Venter considers himself a whiz at hearts, which naturally makes me want to take him down. I lose. The day after Easter we motor over to a secluded lagoon on the other side of the island, where we snorkel some more, and Venter walks naked on the beach. Enriquez whips up his special "coco locos," which pack a punch. That night, somebody paints my toenails purple.

With all this lolling about, you’d think I’d at least be able to corner Venter. But a téte-é-téte - me with my notebook, him with his thoughts - keeps getting put off. Venter really wants to go diving. Sapia could use some help shucking coconuts for her marinade, and what have I done today to pitch in? Howard and Foote are going waveboarding, and, you know, this may be my last chance ever to try it. Three days disappear like magic. I try to explain to Venter that there’s a lot I don’t understand. How can you tell where one species ends and another begins? How do you even know what to call a species? What are you going to do with all the information you gather? What is the question being asked, other than, "Who’s fucking out there?"

"You gotta do your homework, Jamie," Venter says, slipping into his wet suit for another dive. "It’s all in the Sargasso Sea paper."

I retreat to my cabin with the copy I’ve brought along. It’s dense stuff. Searching for clarification on how species boundaries are determined, I find this: "From this set of well-sampled material, we were able to cluster and classify assemblies by organism; from the rare species in our sample, we use sequence similarity based methods together with computational gene finding to obtain both qualitative and quantitative estimates of genomic and functional diversity within this particular marine environment."

This is one of the easier sentences in the text. I put the paper aside and slip back into reading Banks. "I found also this day," he wrote on March 3, 1769, "a large Sepia cuttle fish laying on the water just dead but so pulld to peices by the birds that his Species could not be determind; only this I know that of him was made one of the best soups I ever eat."

Banks was writing more than 200 years ago, but I suspect that most of us are a lot closer to his understanding of what life means than to what Venter and his colleagues are writing about today. Part of the reason, of course, is the obscurity of the life they are exploring. Another reason is that this new approach to exploring biodiversity builds from the ground up, combining DNA sequences into genes, genes into inferred species, species into functional ecosystems. It’s no wonder that the language used to describe it is opaque to those of us accustomed to the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees. Then there is the question of the sheer volume of data being generated. Banks found about 2,500 species, a graspable number. "Just between Halifax and the Galépagos, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find 10 million new genes," Venter tells me. "Maybe 20 million."

Always the big boast - but he’s probably right. Even Venter’s harshest critics have to acknowledge the astonishing amount of information, arguably more than anyone in history, he has generated about life. But how does all this information turn into knowledge ? What conceptual route leads from this tidal wave of data to an organizing idea, in the way that Darwin’s patient measuring of finch beaks and barnacle shapes gradually added up to the theory of natural selection? By the time the Sorcerer II circles the globe and the samples are sequenced and analyzed, Venter may indeed have "collected" 100,000 new species and tens of millions of new genes. Does he, or anyone else, possess the conceptual tools needed to pull some great truth out of such an ocean of information and vivify it like a bolt of lightning bringing Frankenstein’s monster to life?

This question is bouncing around in my head when we all go out to dinner on shore for our last night on Rangiroa. Permission to sample still hasn’t come through, and after a week of hanging out in this frustrating paradise it’s time to head back to Tahiti and home. The 10 of us are sitting at a long table under the stars in a little restaurant Enriquez has found. Venter is at one end of the table, and I’m at the other. Halfway through the meal, he says maybe this is a good time for that interview. It’s not as if there haven’t been plenty of chances to sit down without everybody else around, times when I haven’t had a couple of glasses of wine. I tell him I haven’t brought my notebook. Somebody helpfully rips open a paper bag and hands it to me to write on. Now I’m even more annoyed. But I start writing.

"The goal is to create the mother of all gene databases," Venter says. Let’s say you accomplish that goal, I reply. Is that enough for you personally? Banks set out to collect a lot of new species, and he succeeded. But he didn’t question the meaning of what he was collecting, the way Darwin did. Are we in an era now when just accumulating data is enough, or is there a question you’re trying to answer, an assumption you’re trying to test?

"There’s not one question, there are a million questions," he says.

"I think what Jamie’s asking is whether our expedition is like Charles Darwin’s or more like Joseph Banks’," says Foote. Exactly.

"Darwin didn’t walk around the Galépagos and come up with the theory of evolution," Venter says, a bit testily. "He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn’t until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context."

Would you be satisfied, I ask, if all you did with this expedition was increase the number of genes and species known?

"If I could boost our understanding of the diversity of life by a couple orders of magnitude and be the first person to synthesize life? Yeah," Venter says. "I’d be happy, for a while."

It’s not a very enlightening answer, but I suppose asking someone, "Are you the next Darwin?" isn’t a very fair question. We leave the next afternoon, Venter at the helm as we head out of the passage from the lagoon to the open ocean. It starts to rain, and the seas build until they’re washing over the bow. Given his headlong "sequence now, ask questions later" approach to science, you might expect he’d be at least a little reckless as a sailor, but he’s supremely careful, monitoring the tension on every line, his eyes moving calmly from the sails and the gauges to the crew moving about the deck, watchful most of all for their safety. Once clear of the islands, we take watches through the night while the autopilot steers the boat toward Tahiti. With the roll and pitch of the boat, sleeping is impossible. I stumble up on deck early the next morning - "No standing upon legs without assistance of hands," Banks wrote in his journal on a day with swells like this. Venter is sitting alone in the cockpit, one hand on the helm, the other around a mug of coffee. "We’ve got a few minutes before breakfast," he says casually. "Why don’t we continue that conversation from the other night?"

I’d rather talk when I’m not holding on to the table to keep from falling over, but Tahiti looms off the bow, and I may not get another chance. It turns out that behind his glibness, Venter has actually thought a great deal about what might be called the data overload problem. He acknowledges that neither he nor anyone else yet knows what to make of the millions of gene sequences left in the Sorcerer II ’s wake. "How the hell can anyone work out the function of that many genes?" he says. "There aren’t enough biologists in the world, even if they work full-time on the problem for the rest of their lives."

Still, he says, just appreciating the true extent of the diversity of life on Earth is a major step, even if we have yet to understand which genes belong to which species and what role those genes play in the microbes’ lives. Venter uses astronomy as an analogy. Galileo could peer into a telescope and make inferences about the nature of the universe based on the motions of the stars and planets he observed. But it wasn’t until we understood the true immensity of space and could measure it against the speed of light that we could calculate back in time to the origins of the universe. With whole galaxies of genes to compare, Venter says, perhaps we’ll similarly be able to work back to understanding the origins of life. "Darwin was limited by what he could see with only his eyes, and look what he was able to accomplish," he says. "We want to use the minimal unit of the gene to look at evolution instead. People have been doing this with a dozen genes. We’ll have 10,000."

In the meantime, he imagines creating a Whole Earth Gene Catalog , complete with descriptions of every gene’s function. If you want to find the role of 100,000 genes, Venter says, the trick is to find a way of doing 100,000 experiments at once. All you would need that’s not already available is a synthetic genome, a sort of all-purpose template onto which you could attach any gene you wished, like inserting a blade onto a handle. You could then test the resulting concoction to see if it performed a specific vital task, such as metabolizing sugar or transporting energy. Using existing robotic technologies, you could do thousands of such experiments at once, in much the same way that a combinatorial chemist tests thousands of chemical compounds simultaneously to see if they have the desired effect on a target molecule. Most will not. But the ones that do can be investigated further. "I call it combinatorial genomics," Venter tells me. "It’s one of my better ideas if it works. In fact, it’s one of my better ideas if it doesn’t work."

Whether it works depends, of course, on Venter’s ability to construct a functioning synthetic genome. I ask how that project is coming along. The smallest genome known, that of the infectious bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium , is 100 times the size of the synthetic virus Venter’s team created. He acknowledges that the group is still a long way from being able to create a genome that big, much less getting it to function in a cell. So what they’re working on first is an artificial genome intermediate in size, between a virus and a bacterium. If they succeed, their creation will be unlike anything engineered in a lab.

"Would you call this thing alive?" I ask.

"It’s just a genome," he says. "But yeah, eventually we’ll put it in a cellular context. We’re going public with this by the end of the year. You’ll like it when you hear it."

With Venter, there must always be something new swelling on the horizon. Young Joseph Banks was content just to describe the new varieties of life he collected on his voyage. For him, this was a survey of God’s creation. Aboard the Beagle a half century later, Darwin was already questioning how the species he collected came to be. His ultimate answer wrested the helm from God and put it in the hands of natural processes instead. Now we’re sailing into a new evolutionary time, when we will have at least a finger on the tiller. Venter is hardly the only scientist leading us there, but he alone is taking the measure of life’s true diversity and dreaming up new life-forms at the same time. It’s not surprising that a lot of people, such as the activists who challenged him in the Galépagos, think he’s moving too fast, too heedlessly, into the future. But we can’t go backward. And nothing can be discovered by standing still.

Venter’s team takes samples from ecosystems around the world and sends them to his gene-sequencing HQ at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Maryland. Here’s the way the microbes are snagged, bagged, and tagged.

Craig Venter’s Epic Voyage

How to Hunt Microbes

Joel Khalili

Nena Farrell

Chris Stokel-Walker

Aarian Marshall

Brenda Stolyar

The Voyage of Sorcerer II traces an expedition to unlock the genetic mysteries of the ocean

Scientist and author J. Craig Venter signs copies of his new book Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome at the Arts and Letters club in Toronto, on Oct. 26, 2023. Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

The expedition to crack open the ocean’s genetic treasure chest began in Halifax harbour under an overcast sky.

It was Aug. 20, 2003. J. Craig Venter, the geneticist turned entrepreneur, had arrived with the captain and crew of Sorcerer II, his 95-foot sailing yacht that doubled as a floating field laboratory. His mission: circumnavigate the globe while sampling the ocean waters along the way. It was to be a planet-wide DNA test that would shed light on the full breadth of the ocean’s genetic diversity in a way that had never been attempted before.

Venter was not a novice – to sailing or to mounting large and transformational science projects aimed at overturning the conventional wisdom of his peers.

“Everyone thinks that new discoveries are about making breakthroughs,” Venter told an audience during a recent visit to Toronto, where he sits on the science and innovation advisory committee for the Hospital for Sick Children. But often, discoveries simply overcome bad ideas of the past, he added.

Now 77, Venter was 56 and newly unemployed when he decided to travel around the world by sailboat. By then he was already a world renowned scientist and a notorious iconoclast. His innovative approach to genetic sequencing in the 1990s had allowed him to race the massive Human Genome Project mounted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The effort reached its culmination in the summer of 2000 with the unveiling of a first draft of the full human genetic code three years ahead of schedule by the NIH and Celera Genomics, the company Venter co-founded in 1998.

The joint reveal, brokered by the White House, kept the focus on the future benefits of the achievement for humanity, but Venter has never been shy about saying he won the race. Eighteen months later he was fired from Celera because the leadership of the firm’s parent company “decided they didn’t need this radical scientist any more,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

What followed is documented in The Voyage of Sorcerer II, a book by Venter and his co-author, science writer David Ewing Duncan, that provides a personal account of a unique expedition.

For Venter it was to be the ultimate midlife reset – not to mention a chance to irk colleagues in academia and government who were locked into a more conventional approach.

It was “my best idea,” he said. “I found a way to sail around the world on my own boat and do science and get paid for it.”

It was also Venter’s golden opportunity to finally pursue science in a way that most excited him, as it was once done by Charles Darwin and other 19th-century pioneers: by looking and seeing what’s out there without any idea what might turn up.

Even the choice of Halifax as the expedition’s official starting was a kind of homage to this idea. Halifax had also been visited by HMS Challenger in 1873, the first expedition to survey life in the global ocean’s depths.

That historic voyage famously showed that the seafloor was not a biological desert sterilized by extreme conditions, as some thought at the time. No matter how deep, the ocean was occupied.

Venter frames his own voyage in similar terms, as showing that microbial life in the ocean is far more diverse at the genetic level than expected.

His first run at the idea came with a sailing trip in the spring of 2003 to sample waters in the Sargasso Sea, a portion of the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida where drifting micro-organisms are partly confined by currents.

A small team including expedition scientist Jeff Hoffman filtered some 400 litres of seawater to capture bacteria and then froze the contents for detailed analysis on land.

The results were obtained using the same “shotgun sequencing” technique that Venter had applied so successfully to the human genome. It starts with pulverizing DNA into short random strands that can be read by sequencing machines and then using a computer algorithm to match overlapping readouts from the fragments to reconstruct a complete genetic sequence.

But now, instead assembling the code of a single organism, the algorithm might be working with DNA from many separate bacterial species, invisible and indistinguishable from one another except through their genetic fingerprints.

The result “blew our minds,” said Venter. The Sargasso Sea was teeming with diversity. As detailed in a research paper based on the analysis, the team found 1.2 million newly reported genes from at least 1,800 species including bacterial groups previously unknown to science.

It was an impressive haul but Venter was already working on a far more ambitious sailing trip to gather samples from around the world and show not only the vast richness of microscopic life in the seas but its variation from one location to the next. The uniform blue expanse that represents the ocean on a world map might, in reality, be subdivided into countless microbial domains, evidence of the dynamic multibillion-year evolutionary history of life on Earth.

By summer the expedition was coming together, drawing skepticism from some but also winning early support from some powerful allies, including Ari Patrinos, who was then director of biological research at the U.S. Department of Energy and key funder. Another supporter was the late E.O. Wilson, the celebrated Harvard University biologist.

“He liked that I was asking global questions and treating it as a much big picture,” Venter said.

The expedition’s first sample was collected in Halifax Harbour followed by a road trip by Venter, Hoffman and others across the width of Nova Scotia to scoop water out of the Bay of Fundy with the help of a local fisherman. The drive included a visit with Victor McKusick, the Johns Hopkins University professor known as the father of medical genetics, who had a summer home in the area.

The Sorcerer II soon headed back down the Atlantic coast, first to Hyannis, Mass., and then Annapolis, Md., for a final series of preparations that would allow the ship, under the guidance of Canadian-born Captain Charlie Howard, to travel the open ocean for months-long stretches without support.

In December the sailing and the sampling continued, with the ship making its way to Florida and on to the Caribbean and the Panama Canal. Venter’s initial plan had been to sail around South America but the time of year combined with the treacherous currents around Cape Horn ruled out a long journey around the continent. And there was the likelihood that Brazil would not permit sampling in its territorial waters – a harbinger of the growing debate over who holds sovereignty over genetics information obtained from the environment and any future profits that such information may generate. Although the expedition’s findings were always intended to be made public domain, Venter had already been branded “bio-pirate of the year” by one environmental group ahead of the voyage.

Sorcerer II entered the Pacific via the Panama Canal and onto the Galapagos Islands, following in Darwin’s footsteps but with the added complication of negotiations over permits and transport of samples back to the United States. The joy of exploring the biological wonderland shines through in Venter’s account, as he and his colleagues search for unique environments to sample, including a hydrothermal vent off Roca Redonda, a tiny steep-sided island that is the eroded remnant of an underwater volcano.

From the Galapagos the crew travelled west across the South Pacific, sampling the waters roughly every 200 miles.

“That’s roughly how far you can sail in 24 hours in a decent-size sailboat,” Venter said. “And so we’d stop once a day and take a sample.”

What the scientists on Sorcerer II found was that, at each stop, more than 80 per cent of the genetic sequences was “totally new and unique,” Venter added. The ocean was, as he had guessed, a far more complicated and genetically diverse patchwork of microscopic ecosystems than had once been supposed.

Other adventures were to follow, including an encounter with a SWAT team in Brisbane, which had been called to investigate whether the ship was a floating meth lab – apparently the work of a jilted fiancé whose former partner had become romantically involved with one of the crew. Later, some of the tensest moments of the voyage came during a stop at the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean where the crew had their passports seized by the British military, who threatened to impound the Sorcerer II until Venter was able to reach the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom by satellite phone.

The circumnavigation was completed in January, 2006, when the ship reached Palm Beach, Fla., nearly two and half years after departing Halifax. But it was only to be the beginning of a more sustained campaign of ocean sampling that would next take the ship up the Pacific Coast to Alaska and then on a trip through European waters from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Further excursions to Antarctica and the North Atlantic followed as the sampling work continued until 2018.

The final section of the book details the research results that have issued from the work, including insights into the active role that viruses play as managers of the marine ecosystem with implications for how nutrients cycle through the oceans.

The most significant impact of Sorcerer II’s voyage may be that it signalled the coming of age of metagenomics, the now widely employed technique of sampling the environment rather than organisms directly to understand the biology of the planet. It is an approach that has seen the merge of a revolution in genetics with big data and computational tools.

Despite Venter’s reputation as a pioneer in the use of algorithms to advance genomics, he takes a measured view of the role that AI will play in biology’s next chapter. Algorithms are tools that are only as good as the data they are trained on, he said. Ultimately it’s the mind of the scientist, and the spirit of discovery that gives direction and meaning to the scientific process.

For all its power, he added, AI “can’t answer questions about the unknown.”

Report an error

Editorial code of conduct

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following .

Interact with The Globe

• Science & Math
• Biological Sciences

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: $23.30 $23.30 FREE delivery: Thursday, March 28 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Buy used: $18.77

Other sellers on amazon.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome Hardcover – September 12, 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

“Will undoubtedly shape our understanding of the global ecosystem for decades to come.” ―Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies A celebrated genome scientist sails around the world, collecting tens of millions of marine microbes and revolutionizing our understanding of the microbiome that sustains us. Upon completing his historic work on the Human Genome Project, J. Craig Venter declared that he would sequence the genetic code of all life on earth. Thus began a fifteen-year quest to collect DNA from the world’s oldest and most abundant form of life: microbes. Boarding the Sorcerer II , a 100-foot sailboat turned research vessel, Venter traveled over 65,000 miles around the globe to sample ocean water and the microscopic life within. In The Voyage of Sorcerer II , Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued―of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness the microbial genome to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction. A captivating story of exploration and discovery, The Voyage of Sorcerer II restores microbes to their rightful place as crucial partners in our evolutionary past and guides to our future.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date September 12, 2023
• Dimensions 5.7 x 1.3 x 8.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0674246470
• ISBN-13 978-0674246478
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

From the Publisher

Editorial reviews, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (September 12, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674246470
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674246478
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.7 x 1.3 x 8.3 inches
• #27 in Biotechnology (Books)
• #92 in Genetics (Books)
• #271 in Environmental Science (Books)

About the author

J. craig venter.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top review from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

The Future does not Arrive Suddenly: Why we Need Visioners

Poetic reason as the creative center in maría zambrano, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, thousands of biological clocks keep time in the human body, featured author, latest book, craig venter, the man who knew himself.

It’s not very usual for biologists to own luxury yachts almost 30 metres long, and for those who have them, it’s not common to dedicate them to collecting samples of marine microbes with a view to having their genomes sequenced. But John Craig Venter (Salt Lake City, USA, October 14, 1946) is not your usual biologist. When in 2004 he undertook a scientific expedition around the world aboard his sailboat Sorcerer II , he didn’t do so to emulate Charles Darwin in the HMS Beagle , but rather to surpass him, to “contextualize everything that Darwin missed,” according to what Venter told Wired in 2004 . And maybe this example serves to illustrate what it is that some praise and others criticize in the scientist and entrepreneur who is currently turning 70: ambitions so lofty they can only be reached on the stilts of an equally elevated ego.

Rebellion is not normally the inheritance of the intelligent, but perhaps intelligence is the salvation of the rebellious. For Venter, his IQ of 142 allowed him to spend more time surfing than studying during his childhood in California, without fear of harming his future. And being drafted into a war –the one in Vietnam– which he opposed, allowed him to voluntarily choose his role in it, that of health. From those terrible years at the University of Death, as he defined it in his autobiography A Life Decoded (Viking, 2007), comes the story of a suicide attempt by swimming out to sea, a story that feeds his legend.

Venter began to earn a reputation as the bad boy of molecular biology during his initial period at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While there, he perfected a technique called Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) that has since been employed by thousands of researchers around the world, and which allows them to obtain and store copies for study of all the active genes in a cell. That first achievement revealed the direction that Venter’s career would follow – the application of groundbreaking techniques, often already existing but underused, that propel great leaps forward at the frontiers of biology. But it was also his first scandal when it was learned that Venter and the NIH were attempting to patent the genes identified by the EST.

Venter vs. the discoverer of DNA

While the protests ruined the aspiration to patent genes, Venter became embroiled in a new dispute with the scientific establishment when the technique that he proposed for the Human Genome Project was rejected . Instead of trying to sequence long DNA strands of chromosomes by moving over them gingerly, step by step, as had hitherto been done, Venter proposed a more explosive option: smashing the genome into countless small pieces and sending them into the air, reading them, and then letting computers glue the pieces of the vase back together. James Watson , co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, dismissed the technique, suggesting that it belonged to monkeys.

Clearly, Venter did not try to be particularly cordial. When he founded the company Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome on its own, thereby competing with the public project, he recommended that those responsible for the latter should devote their efforts to another organism, more specifically, the mouse. It is said that Watson came to compare him to Hitler, but Venter’s ego and ambition had solid foundations. The shotgun sequencing technique , which he did not invent but rather optimized, managed to finish the race to map the human genome at the same time as the public project, but the latter was forced to redouble its efforts so as not to be defeated by the uncomfortable competition from Venter.

Venter’s victory opened the door to everything else: public notoriety, respect from his colleagues, a place on the lists of the most influential people, new businesses, money and, of course, the yacht. The Global Ocean Sampling Expedition , completed in 2006, was one more piece in the grand scheme that Venter is currently working on. Sequencing the biodiversity of the oceans is itself a target of Darwinian proportions; however, it is not the final goal, but rather a milestone that extends the catalogue of microbes available to be converted into the factories of the future: modified microorganisms that produce drugs or fuel , or are responsible for collecting the garbage that we spread around the planet.

Objective: create synthetic life

But beyond the customized microbes, there is still a higher purpose: Venter yearns to become the first human to create synthetic life. This was described in his book: “I want to move away from the coast into uncharted waters, into a new phase of evolution, the day when one species based on DNA can sit in front of a computer to design another.” In March 2016, he published his latest conquest to date , creating a minimal synthetic genome able to operate a cell with only 473 genes.

In person, Venter seems affable, though distant. His apparent attempt to be pleasant produces the feeling of hiding a hint of coldness, which is revealed when he reacts harshly to questions with intent, those that a journalist is required to ask. But without doubt Venter knows that it is not only science that interests him. At the end of the day, he wanted it this way: Venter did not bequeath to humanity just any genome, but his own genome.

As if following the conventions in the “know thyself” field, his autobiography is sprinkled with annotations explaining aspects of his life and personality from the perspective of his genes. “I want to find out if a decoded life is really a life understood,” he wrote. “New interpretations of Craig Venter, based on my DNA, will continue to be made long after life has left my body. I have no other choice but to leave the ultimate interpretation to the reader and to History.” Like that, with a capital H.

By Javier Yanes for Ventana al Conocimiento

Related publications.

• What Happened to our Genomes?
• CRISPR-CAS: More than Just "Scissors"
• "Genes can be cloned, but not people", Francisco J. Ayala

More about Science

Environment, leading figures, mathematics, scientific insights, more publications about ventana al conocimiento (knowledge window), comments on this publication.

Morbi facilisis elit non mi lacinia lacinia. Nunc eleifend aliquet ipsum, nec blandit augue tincidunt nec. Donec scelerisque feugiat lectus nec congue. Quisque tristique tortor vitae turpis euismod, vitae aliquam dolor pretium. Donec luctus posuere ex sit amet scelerisque. Etiam sed neque magna. Mauris non scelerisque lectus. Ut rutrum ex porta, tristique mi vitae, volutpat urna.

Sed in semper tellus, eu efficitur ante. Quisque felis orci, fermentum quis arcu nec, elementum malesuada magna. Nulla vitae finibus ipsum. Aenean vel sapien a magna faucibus tristique ac et ligula. Sed auctor orci metus, vitae egestas libero lacinia quis. Nulla lacus sapien, efficitur mollis nisi tempor, gravida tincidunt sapien. In massa dui, varius vitae iaculis a, dignissim non felis. Ut sagittis pulvinar nisi, at tincidunt metus venenatis a. Ut aliquam scelerisque interdum. Mauris iaculis purus in nulla consequat, sed fermentum sapien condimentum. Aliquam rutrum erat lectus, nec placerat nisl mollis id. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Nam nisl nisi, efficitur et sem in, molestie vulputate libero. Quisque quis mattis lorem. Nunc quis convallis diam, id tincidunt risus. Donec nisl odio, convallis vel porttitor sit amet, lobortis a ante. Cras dapibus porta nulla, at laoreet quam euismod vitae. Fusce sollicitudin massa magna, eu dignissim magna cursus id. Quisque vel nisl tempus, lobortis nisl a, ornare lacus. Donec ac interdum massa. Curabitur id diam luctus, mollis augue vel, interdum risus. Nam vitae tortor erat. Proin quis tincidunt lorem.

The rise of Machine Intelligence: Computer Chess

Do you want to stay up to date with our new publications.

Receive the OpenMind newsletter with all the latest contents published on our website

OpenMind Books

• The Search for Alternatives to Fossil Fuels
• View all books

About OpenMind

Connect with us.

• Keep up to date with our newsletter

• Featured News
• Artificial Intelligence
• Bioprocessing
• Drug Discovery
• Genome Editing
• Infectious Diseases
• Translational Medicine
• Browse Issues
• Learning Labs
• eBooks/Perspectives
• GEN Biotechnology
• Re:Gen Open
• New Products
• Conference Calendar
• Get GEN Magazine
• Get GEN eNewsletters

From Sequencing to Sailing: Three Decades of Adventure with Craig Venter

In a plenary public appearance at the Molecular and Precision Med TRI-CON event in San Diego, a relaxed Venter reflected on his career highlights, controversies and future priorities for genomic medicine

J. Craig Venter, interviewed in the plenary session of Molecular and Precision Med TRI-CON on March 6, 2023, in San Diego. [Cambridge Healthtech Institute]

SAN DIEGO— More than two decades after making history by being an integral part of the Human Genome Project celebration, J. Craig Venter, PhD still holds a few surprises up his sleeve. In a public appearance at the annual Molecular and Precision Med TRI-CON event, he revealed how he nearly pulled out of the White House celebration in June 2000 after objecting to a first draft of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s prepared remarks.

The TRI-CON event, hosted by Cambridge Healthtech Institute, celebrates its 30th year this year.

“[The genome revolution] has fallen way short. The sequencing technology has improved by so many exponents but people think that the sequencing is sufficient,” said Venter. “I learned through my assumptions made on my own genome that without measuring the comprehensive phenotype, the genome was virtually worthless.”

Venter emphasized that studying human biology in conjunction with the genome is required to make strides in genomic medicine. “If I had to choose between having my genome sequence and a whole body MRI for health,” Venter said, “I would take the whole body MRI. But the future is combining the two.” Venter co-founded Human Longevity, a company offering state-of-the-art personal genome and imaging screens for clients, in 2013.

Venter’s legacy as a genomics legend established its roots over 30 years ago, starting with a paper published in Science in 1991 , in which Venter’s team at the National Institutes of Health  applied random cDNA sequencing to identify more than 300 human genes of plausible biological function, coining the term “expressed sequence tags.”

“My institute director of neurology complained that I was wiping out all these PhD theses randomly by publishing all these sequences. Of course, that wasn’t the goal. The point was that I’d spent 10 years trying to get one gene and I didn’t want to have to do that again.”

Throughout the 1990s, Venter’s notoriety steadily grew with controversy over the commercialization of DNA discoveries. In 1995, Venter’s team at his non-profit, The Institute for Genome Research (TIGR), published the first microbial genome sequences. In May 1998, he stunned the public HGP consortium by announcing a for-profit effort to sequence the human genome, which later became Celera Genomics.

Venter remembered the day at the White House, June 26, 2000 , when President Bill Clinton celebrated the completion of the first draft of the human genome alongside National Human Genome Research Institute director, Francis Collins MD, PhD. The event was the culmination of a diplomatically negotiated truce of sorts.

The White House ceremony “was dictated by when Celera finished the first assembly in its computer. That’s when we actually had the first genome. There was a lot of back and forth politics because the public effort hadn’t finished their assembly yet,” Venter said.

Venter recalled reviewing British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech the night before the ceremony and nearly withdrew from the White House event. “[Blair’s speech] was totally lopsided, attacking Celera and companies sequencing genomes. I said, ‘If you want me to show up, you’ll change the speech.’ [After a back and forth] the White House science advisor called me at 1 am and assured me that the speech had changed.”

Venter’s decision to agree to a joint declaration was “a moment of pragmatism” that actually angered his team and wife, whom Venter says did not speak to him for a week.

“The reality was that Celera was so far ahead and people just wanted to announce and publish it. I thought it wouldn’t help science at all if we undercut the NIH and decided that the best thing for science and the public was to have a truce,” stated Venter.

The personal genome

Since the White House announcement in 2000, the field of genomics has continued to boom, most recently culminating with the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium’s sequencing of the entire human genome in 2022. Asked for his thoughts on these advances, Venter was unfazed.

“We ‘finally finished’ [the human genome] so many times that I lost track! It’s never finally finished, as each of us has a completely unique genome sequence.”

Venter emphasized how each individual’s diploid genome presents orders-of-magnitude more variation than the haploid representation, noting how Sam Levy PhD and colleagues from the J. Craig Venter Institute published the first relatively complete diploid genome — Venter’s personal genome—in 2007.

When asked about the value of genome data to the personal owner of the genome, Venter reflected on his own experiences sharing his genomic information with the public.“My sequence has been out there for so long. There were many people publishing papers of new childhood diseases that I should have died from!” said Venter.

Venter stated that genomic information should be personally controlled, where individuals make the decision on whether to make it publicly available the same way that he did. In addition, Venter said his decision to share his genome was in response to the fear of genome sequencing at the time.

“You might recall editorials [stating] how dangerous it was to have your genome sequenced. Donating my genome and making it available was meant to prove that it wasn’t something to fear,” said Venter.

Under the sea

Venter closed the interview by describing the expansion of his work into metagenomics and his new endeavors sailing the world, a vision that Venter said “kept him sane” during his time as a medical corpsman in Vietnam.

“Once we [sequenced the first genome], we got tons of funding to sequence every genome on the planet,” said Venter. “We did what the Challenger expedition did in the 1870s, where we sailed around the world to examine the bottom of the ocean,” Venter continued.

Venter described shotgun sequencing of filtered sea water samples and being “blown away” by [the diversity of organisms]. He published this sequencing work from the Sargasso Sea in Science in 2004. Venter painted the voyage as a mix of scientific discoveries, logistical challenges and near catastrophe.

“Darwin had it easy!” Venter said. “He could collect samples from anywhere. Nowadays, we need a permit from everywhere to take a water sample 200 miles off their coast. We got arrested by the French and British government. The French even threatened to sink our boat! There was a lot of excitement just to sequence these new genomes.”

Venter has documented these nautical adventures in his upcoming book, co-authored with David Ewing Duncan, called The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secret’s of the Ocean’s Microbiome . It will be released in September 2023.

OncoMethylome Enhances Pharmacogenomic Services in Deal with BioTrove

Mechanism for gene silencing in skin cancer discovered.

J. Craig Venter's Amazing Decade

2000: President Bill Clinton declares a tie in the race to map the human genome, giving credit to both Venter and his publicly funded rival, Francis Collins. Far from being finished, Venter considers it "the starting line" for the future of medicine.

2001: The Institute for Genomic Research, founded by Venter, helps sequence the genome of the anthrax strain mailed in the attacks that killed five people— evidence that eventually leads the FBI to the source.

2004: Sorcerer II, Venter's 95-foot sailboat, leaves Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a two-year circum­navigation of the globe in search of new microbial species for DNA sequencing.

2005: Venter starts the for-profit Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI) to work on solving global problems, such as fossil-fuel dependence, environmental degradation and disease epidemics.

2007: He establishes another first by mapping the 6-billion-letter code of his own "diploid" genome (DNA from both chromosome pairs, one from each parent), discovering a genetic predisposition for blue eyes, antisocial behavior and heart disease.

2008: Using a computer code and four bottles of chemicals, Venter's lab creates the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970-base-pair genome of a bacterium.

2009: He announces SGI will receive $300 million from Exxon Mobil to engineer algae cells that turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into biofuel.

2010: Venter's team uses a synthetic genome to boot up the world's first man-made bacterial cell. Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 becomes the first living organism to have its own website encoded in its chromosomes.

.css-cuqpxl:before{padding-right:0.3125rem;content:'//';display:inline;} Health .css-xtujxj:before{padding-left:0.3125rem;content:'//';display:inline;}

What 9 Months on a Cruise Ship Can Do to You

Scientists Just Figured Out Why Pee is Yellow

Nikola Tesla's Secrets to Longevity

Scientists Set to Break the Blood-Brain Barrier

This ‘Junk’ DNA May Be Vital to Life on Earth

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: What Everyone Missed

Can Hibernation Cure Human Diseases?

When Does Consciousness Begin? It’s Complicated.

How to Cure a Hangover, According to Science

These ‘Anthrobots’ Could Treat Wounds and Disease

Experts Discover How New Genes Form From Nothing

Craig Venter: Science, sailboats and making room for creativity

( Aug. 16, 2018 )  Craig Venter wants to talk about sailing. He may be the man whose work in sequencing the human genome defined much of scientific advancement in the 20th century, but right now he wants to talk about his sailboat. The boat in question was designed by Olin Stevens and built in 1935. It is 43 feet long and named  Sonny.

“Science and sailing go together,” Venter said. “Einstein was a sailor. It’s a way of restoring your sensibilities and bringing everything back together. You’re not using anything artificial. Wind and water and people and what they do. A boat that’s older than I am and us trying to make it go fast through the water.”

Venter also owns a boat called   Sorcerer II ,  on which he logged 80,000 miles circling the globe, taking ocean samples, collecting organisms and bringing them back to his lab to sequence their DNA. The 95-foot sloop is a great boat for such a voyage of discovery, which echoes similar expeditions undertaken in the 1800s, he said.

Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research, as well as his latest project, Human Longevity Inc. He turns 72 later this month. Like a lot of people who have fallen under the sway of wooden  sailboats, he finds something very elemental in racing a boat like   Sonny .

To read the complete story, pick up the print edition of this week’s Inquirer and Mirror.

Other items that may interest you

St. Mary’s pews free for the taking

Year in review top story: biden’s working vacation, parking restrictions, street closures for friday ….

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World

By Wil S. Hylton

• May 30, 2012

In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house.

Each of the bugs will have a mission. Some will be designed to devour things, like pollution. Others will generate food and fuel. There will be bugs to fight global warming, bugs to clean up toxic waste, bugs to manufacture medicine and diagnose disease, and they will all be driven to complete these tasks by the very fibers of their synthetic DNA.

Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.

What’s strange about Venter is that this works — that the clarity he finds when he is hurtling through the sea and the sky, the dreams he summons, the fantasies he concocts in his most unhinged moments of excess actually have a way of coming true. He dreamed of mapping the human genome, and he did it. He dreamed of creating a synthetic organism, and he made it. In 2003, he scrawled a line across a map of the world, hopped on his boat with a small team and sailed around the planet in search of new forms of life. By the time they returned, two years later, they had discovered more species than anyone in history.

And last fall, Venter was back in motion at the end of another journey. He was crouched atop his touring bike in the final stretch of a weeklong sprint through the American Southwest, with a handful of friends trailing behind as he whipped through the mountain foothills in a blur. In the days to come, he would return to his office to piece together a design for the first of his custom bugs. But as he streaked back toward the lab, he made a final detour, swerving into the parking lot of a bakery to grab a slice of fresh pie. Venter hopped off his motorcycle, lifted his helmet and grinned into the California sun. “We hit 110!” he said. “Now I feel like I can go back to work.”

In This Article: • A Sci-Fi Fantasy Made Possible? • To Seek Out New Life • Yellow Algae Is Just the Beginning • The Art of Creating Life • Starting From Scratch

A Sci-Fi Fantasy Made Possible?

The prospect of artificial life is so outlandish that we rarely even mean the words. Most of the time we mean clever androids or computers that talk. Even the pages of science fiction typically stop short: in the popular dystopian narrative, robots are always taking over, erecting armies, firing death rays and sometimes even learning to love, but underneath their replicant skin, they tend to be made of iron ore. From the Terminator to the Matrix to the awakening of HAL, what preoccupies the modern imagination is the sentient evolution of machines, not artificial life itself.

But inside the laboratories of biotechnology, a more literal possibility is taking hold: What if machines really were alive? To some extent, this is already happening. Brewers and bakers have long relied on the diligence of yeast to make beer and bread, and in medical manufacturing, it has become routine to harness organisms like Penicillium to generate drugs. At DuPont, engineers are using modified E. coli to produce polyester for carpet, and the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi is using yeast injected with strips of synthetic DNA to manufacture medicine. But the possibility of designing a new organism, entirely from synthetic DNA, to produce whatever compounds we want, would mark a radical leap forward in biotechnology and a paradigm shift in manufacturing.

The appeal of biological machinery is manifold. For one thing, because organisms reproduce, they can generate not only their target product but also more factories to do the same. Then too, microbes use novel fuel. Chances are, unless you’ve slipped off the grid, virtually every machine you own, from your iPhone to your toaster oven, depends on burning fossil fuels to work. Even if you have slipped off the grid, manufacturing those devices required massive carbon emissions. This is not necessarily the case for biomachinery. A custom organism could produce the same plastic or metal as an industrial plant while feeding on the compounds in pollution or the energy of the sun.

Then there is the matter of yield. Over the last 60 years, agricultural production has boomed in large part through plant modification, chemical additives and irrigation. But as the world population continues to soar, adding nearly a billion people over the past decade, major aquifers are giving out, and agriculture may not be able to keep pace with the world’s needs. If a strain of algae could secrete high yields of protein, using less land and water than traditional crops, it may represent the best hope to feed a booming planet.

Finally, the rise of biomachinery could usher in an era of spot production. “Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform,” Drew Endy, an assistant professor at Stanford University, told me recently. Endy is trained as an engineer but has become a leading proponent of synthetic biology. He sketched a picture of what “distributed manufacturing” by microbes might look like: say a perfume company could design a bacterium to produce an appealing aroma; “rather than running this in a large-scale fermenter, they would upload the DNA sequences onto the future equivalent of iTunes,” he said. “People all over the world could then pay a fee to download the information.” Then, Endy explained, customers could simply synthesize the bugs at home and grow them on their skin. “They could transform epidermal ecosystems to have living production of scents and fragrances,” he said. “Living perfume!”

Whether all this could really happen — or should — depends on whom you ask. The challenge of building a synthetic bacterium from raw DNA is as byzantine as it probably sounds. It means taking four bottles of chemicals — the adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine that make up DNA — and linking them into a daisy chain at least half a million units long, then inserting that molecule into a host cell and hoping it will spring to life as an organism that not only grows and reproduces but also manufactures exactly what its designer intended. (A line about hubris, Icarus and Frankenstein typically follows here.) Since the late 1990s, laboratories around the world have been experimenting with synthetic biology, but many scientists believe that it will take decades to see major change. “We’re still really early,” Endy said. “Or to say it differently, we’re still really bad.”

Venter disagrees. The future, he says, may be sooner than we think. Much of the groundwork is already done. In 2003, Venter’s lab used a new method to piece together a strip of DNA that was identical to a natural virus, then watched it spring to action and attack a cell. In 2008, they built a longer genome, replicating the DNA of a whole bacterium, and in 2010 they announced that they brought a bacterium with synthetic DNA to life. That organism was still mostly a copy of one in nature, but as a flourish, Venter and his team wrote their names into its DNA, along with quotes from James Joyce and J. Robert Oppenheimer and even secret messages. As the bacteria reproduced, the quotes and messages and names remained in the colony’s DNA.

In theory, this leaves just one step between Venter and a custom species. If he can write something more useful than his name into the synthetic DNA of an organism, changing its genetic function in some deliberate way, he will have crossed the threshold to designer life.

Unless he already has.

To Seek Out New Life

In person, Venter is a sturdy 65-year-old with a ring of gray hair, a deep tan, perpetual stubble and crow’s feet that dance around his eyes. When he caught the world’s attention, in 1998, he was leading a private company, Celera Genomics, in a race against the government’s Human Genome Project to complete the first map of human DNA. That race ended in June 2000, when Venter and the director of the government program, Francis S. Collins, shared a lectern at the White House to declare a tie. Neither man particularly wanted to be there, and each believed his own map was superior, but in the interest of science and at the urging of President Bill Clinton, both grudgingly relented.

In the decade since, Collins has gone on to lead the National Institutes of Health, while Venter has mostly drifted away from the capital, where his challenge to the N.I.H. did not particularly kindle friendships. Though his nonprofit organization, the J. Craig Venter Institute, maintains a base in Rockville, Md., Venter spends most of his time in California, where he grew up and is currently building a $35 million laboratory on the campus of his alma mater, the University of California, San Diego. The building is designed to be carbon-neutral, with solar power and rainwater catchment, nestled on 1.75 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean; less than two miles away, Venter has renovated a $6 million home with sweeping curvilinear architecture, which is perched on a hilltop of breathtaking views.

In contrast to his lavish home and office, Venter’s commercial enterprise makes a rather humdrum sight. Tucked into a suburban office park, a few miles north of his home, the headquarters of Synthetic Genomics Inc. is a leased two-story box plopped beside a highway. Yet in some ways, the building is the more exciting locus of Venter’s work. Though its grounds and mission are less expansive than the institute, S.G.I. is where Venter’s breakthroughs will be refined and marketed whenever they have real-world potential.

One day recently, I visited the S.G.I. building to have a look around. I found Venter in his office on the second floor, watching a video on his iPad of a race car he nearly crashed last fall at 120 miles per hour. We watched that footage for a while, then another video from a motorcycle trip, and Venter said he had recently flown a helicopter for the first time.

For a scientist, Venter spends little time in the lab, but it would be a mistake to confuse this with a lack of focus. All critical decisions at his company and his institute ultimately ascend to Venter, who monitors the work of about 500 scientists every day, imparting various kinds of guidance and direction, even if he has to be patched in by satellite. After a few minutes in his office, we were joined by Gerardo Toledo, the company’s senior director of microbial discovery. Toledo is lean and angular with hazel skin and amused eyes. In his spare time, he competes in Ironman triathlons and chases Venter on dirt bikes through the California hills. He suggested we visit the labs on the first floor, and as we descended a flight of stairs, he explained that part of the company’s mission is to find, usually in nature, the genetic components that might be useful in synthetic life. For Toledo, this meant scouring the planet for intriguing microbes with uncommon genes. “The idea is to try to understand the extent of microbe diversity,” he said.

Earth is a microbial planet. Micro-organisms make up about half the planet’s biomass, and without them, large animals could not survive. Because they are so small, so abundant and so differentiated, they also contain most of the earth’s genetic diversity. One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the human-genome projects, both at the N.I.H. and at Celera, was the revelation that humans have relatively few genes. Before the human-genome map, most scientists assumed that there were about 100,000 genes in our DNA. In fact, there are about 20,000, or fewer than those of a typical grape. That discovery was one reason that Venter began trolling the oceans in search of new forms of microbial life. Over the past nine years, he and his crew at the institute have collected water samples from thousands of locations, sending them to his lab to be screened and genetically mapped. In total, they have discovered hundreds of thousands of new species (the number is imprecise because the term “species” can be muddy) and about 60 million new genes. There were genes to help organisms survive in chemically noxious water, genes that led to the production of hydrogen and genes that trigger the manufacture of antibiotics, to name just a few. How Venter might incorporate those genes into a designer species one day remains to be seen. But as we walked down the hallways of S.G.I., Toledo explained that the company’s quest to discover microbes is not limited to the oceans.

He stopped by a framed photograph of a hand filled with oily dirt. “That picture is in Malaysia,” he said. “Oil palm is one of the highest oil-producing crops, but we’re trying to see how that can be enhanced. First by understanding its genome and how it can be better. And second to understand what is the ecosystem of all the microbes that fit with it and help it, for example, to assimilate nutrients and prevent diseases.”

We continued past a series of glassed-in labs, where scientists hunched over flasks filled with green fluid, and Toledo explained that some of the earliest organisms that S.G.I. plans to modify will be strains of algae. That’s because algae, even in a natural state, offer an enticing combination of features: they photosynthesize, capturing energy from the sun; they can absorb carbon dioxide, removing a greenhouse gas from the environment; and they produce oil to store energy, which could be cultivated into food or fuel. For decades, scientists have been tinkering with algae to make them more productive and efficient, but success has been elusive. Venter is convinced that the problem will never be solved by tinkering alone. “Algae didn’t evolve to produce tens of thousands of gallons of oil per acre,” he said. “So we have to force the evolution.” For now, S.G.I. is studying natural strains, but the goal is not to select any one of them; it’s to combine the best qualities from each. “We’re collecting all this knowledge,” Venter said, “and then we have to put it all together and design something that hasn’t existed before.”

Yellow Algae Is Just the Beginning

If the promise of synthetic biology is expansive, the potential for catastrophe is plain. The greater the reach of biomachinery, the more urgent the need to understand its risks. As every hobby gardener knows, the introduction of an outside species can quickly devastate an ecosystem. From the kudzu vine to the gypsy moth to the Burmese python surge in the Everglades, we often discover the impact of a species only when it’s too late. Looking to the dawn of a biomachine age, many environmental groups worry that synthetic bugs could become the ultimate invasive species. “It’s almost inevitable that there will be some level of escape,” Helen Wallace, the executive director of the watchdog group GeneWatch, told me. “The question is: Will those organisms survive and reproduce? I don’t think anyone knows.”

The reassurance offered by Venter and other proponents may not be convincing to everyone. A synthetic bug, they say, has little chance of surviving in the competitive natural ecosystem, and anyway, it could be designed to die without chemical support. In 2010, President Obama ordered his bioethics commission to examine the implications of Venter’s work, and the commission found “limited risks.” Still, a person can be forgiven for recalling the moment in “Jurassic Park” when Dr. Ian Malcolm smirks at a team of genetic engineers and warns them, “Life finds a way.”

At the S.G.I. office, Venter suggested we step outside to visit the greenhouse, where the most promising strains of algae were already growing in open air. We met up with Jim Flatt, the chief technology officer, and followed a narrow path through woods until we emerged at a massive glass facility. We stepped into a staging area filled with hoses and flasks, beside a laboratory stacked with computers and machines. Through a wall of windows, we could see into the main room, where algae was growing in vats under bright sunlight. Each was affixed with a small plastic tube that piped in shots of carbon dioxide. “We use bottled CO2,” Flatt said, “but in an industrial facility, we would use an industrial source. That could be captured from a power plant. It could be captured from a geothermal resource. It could be captured from a cement plant. Or it could be captured from a refinery.”

As Flatt and I poked around, Venter wandered over to chat with a scientist monitoring the algae on a computer, then he stooped by a benchtop shaker with four conical flasks of algae. Three of the samples were deep green; the fourth was brilliant yellow. Venter explained that the yellow algae was the first strain engineered by S.G.I. to include a portion of synthetic DNA. In fact, the color of the algae was the synthetic modification. Changing the pigment of algae may seem trivial, but it represents a critical factor for commercial success. One challenge to growing algae at scale is that a successful strain, by definition, tends to reproduce quickly and turn dark green. This blocks sunlight to the algae below, and requires more-frequent care and harvest. A strain engineered to a lighter color could allow the organisms to grow more densely without obstructing essential light. The yellow algae in Venter’s greenhouse was just the first to include a synthetic adjustment, but it would be followed by a series of similar changes. Even as the company modified pigment, it could also experiment with synthetic alterations to boost the production of oil and even force the algae to secrete that oil into surrounding water. “Their objective is to grow and survive,” Flatt said, “not necessarily to produce things for us. So that’s where the engineering comes into place. We say, ‘We’re going to force you to give it up.’ ”

We stepped into the main room of the greenhouse and walked between huge tubs filled with algae. The next step, Venter said, was to move the algae outside into large ponds. “None of this can be done at the lab scale and have any meaning,” he said. “People take stuff in a little test tube and multiply it by several million or something, and claim they have these yields. But nothing works the same in a giant facility. Most things fail when you take them outside.” To that end, S.G.I. had recently purchased an 81-acre parcel of land about 150 miles away, right beside the Salton Sea, where it can begin to cultivate its most successful strains. The site, he added, also sits near a geothermal power plant, which doesn’t burn fossil fuels but does release carbon dioxide from underground. Venter was already in discussion with the plant’s owner to divert its carbon emissions into the algae. It was possible that, within months, his algae would be turning pollution into food and oil.

We came to the last tub in the room, filled with the telltale yellow: a culture of synthetically modified organisms growing in the open air. They were the color of lemon-lime sports drink and, in the bright sunlight, had a radiant glow. It was like peering into a bathtub filled with the juice of 1,000 light sticks.

Venter gazed happily at the algae. “The photosynthetic process has been working for about three and a half billion years,” he said. “This is the first major change.”

The Art of Creating Life

Venter’s house above La Jolla is a swirl of clean, modern lines, with a sprawling kitchen at one end and hideaway nooks all around. There is a wine room that doubles as a walk-in humidor, an outdoor pool that seems to reach into the ocean and, in the garage below, an electric Tesla Roadster that pops from 0-60 in less than four seconds.

Two weeks ago, Venter met me at the door in jeans and a sweatshirt, and we sat down to chat on a brown leather sofa overlooking the Pacific. Nearby, a six-foot sculpture of a humpback whale leapt from a knotty burl of hardwood. Venter took a sip of a drink and leaned back with a sigh. “It’s too bad we have to do an interview,” he said.

Over the last decade, I have followed Venter’s work closely, which often meant following Venter himself on strange and harrowing journeys. Through the years, I’ve sailed with him, flown with him, dived with him and raced across the desert on motorcycles with him, often against my better judgment and at speeds I prefer not to recall. Many of Venter’s peers in science find his reckless hobbies and temperament obnoxious. No story about his work fails to mention the legion of biologists who despise him or the legendary berth of his ego. This hostility comes partly from his entrepreneurial approach to science. After he challenged the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, he was accused by the eminent James D. Watson, who was a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953, of trying to “own the human genome the way Hitler wanted to own the world.” But to the colleagues who have worked with Venter for decades, his reputation as an egotist can be puzzling. At a dinner table or a cocktail party, Venter is far more likely to brag about his skill at dominoes than any professional accomplishment, and he quickly becomes awkward and irritable when a crowd of admirers surrounds him at a reception.

This is not to say that Venter is modest. He is not. But what defines him is less the show of ego than its immovable mass. When Venter tackles a scientific problem, he tends to ignore just about everyone else working on it and to dismiss whatever approach they are taking — and shoot for the fastest way to beat them to the finish line. Speed is Venter’s muse and siren. The same manic energy that propels him into race cars and speedboats animates his professional life, leaving behind as many enemies as breakthroughs.

When Venter announced, in 2010, that he brought to life the first bacteria with entirely synthetic DNA, he was met with equal parts ceremony and dismissal. Many scientists hailed the achievement as a watershed moment in human history. “The ability to design and create new forms of life,” the prominent physicist Freeman Dyson proclaimed, “marks a turning point in the history of our species and our planet.” Yet others insisted that, because the DNA was modeled on a natural organism and was inserted into a natural cell, the claims of “synthetic life” were overblown. “He has not created life, only mimicked it,” the Nobel laureate David Baltimore insisted.

When I asked the bioethicist Arthur Caplan about these extremes of adulation and indifference, Caplan did not hesitate. Though he has criticized the Obama ethics commission for underestimating the risk of synthetic biology, he praised Venter himself as revolutionary. “He’s about three major innovations back from the Nobel Prize he should have gotten already,” Caplan said. “When you have the kinds of breakthroughs and insights that he’s had, it’s inexcusable that you wouldn’t reward that kind of work with the Nobel — and it has to be battles over personality and character, more about him than anything else.”

When I asked Venter about his reception among scientists, he was uncharacteristically nonchalant. “Some senior biologists, who in theory should know better than anybody else, keep talking about the importance of the cell,” he shrugged. “They argue: ‘Well, the cell contributed something. It can’t just be the DNA.’ That’s like saying God contributed something. The trouble for these people, it is just the DNA. You have to have the cell there to read it, but we’re 100 percent DNA software systems.” He pointed out that when his lab inserted the DNA of one organism into the cell body of another, the cell became a different organism.

Venter was quick to acknowledge that he still hadn’t created a microbe that serves an innovative purpose. “Sorry we didn’t design some new creature that never existed before as our opening gambit,” he said with a laugh. “What we published was the proof of concept. It’s like: ‘Gee, it would be really nice if the Wright brothers made a supersonic jet! Because that would have been much more useful!’ ”

This seemed like a good opportunity to ask Venter whether he had come any closer to that goal — whether, in addition to the algae modification at S.G.I., his team at the institute was working on another whole-genome assembly. Since the May 2010 announcement, Venter has been comparatively quiet, but it would be unlike him not to silence his critics. I asked him how far he had come over the last two years.

Venter was quiet for a long time. He nodded his head, as if making some calculation, then he said: “We’re doing a grand experiment. We’re trying to design the first cell from scratch.” He suggested we head into town for dinner with his two closest partners in synthetic biology, to discuss the leap they were about to take.

“It’s a little bit of a black art,” he said.

Starting From Scratch

Venter’s closest collaborators in the lab are Hamilton O. Smith and Clyde A. Hutchison III, each vaunted in his own right. Smith shared a Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on restriction enzymes, and Hutchison’s long pedigree in genetic mapping began in 1975, when he helped the pioneer Frederick Sanger sequence the first genome of a virus, for which Sanger shared his second Nobel in 1980. At 80, Smith is tall and genial, with hearing aides and a slight stoop; Hutchison is 10 years younger, with a boyish flop of hair in his eyes and an air of perpetual worry. Together they enjoy a crotchety rapport that delights Venter endlessly. “They’re like the two old guys in the balcony on the Muppets,” he said. “But they’ve both reached a point in their careers where they can afford to take risks they never would’ve taken 20 years ago — it’s like having the oldest, smartest postdocs in the world.”

As we settled around a dinner table in downtown La Jolla, a waitress delivered foie gras from the chef, setting a plate between Smith and Hutchison, who immediately lurched forward to examine it.

“What’s that?” Hutchison asked.

“Goose liver,” Venter said.

“Oh,” Hutchison said. “I like liver.”

Smith frowned. “It’s glycogen,” he observed.

“Yeah, glycogen,” Hutchison said. “Glycogen is almost like carbohydrate.”

“It is carbohydrate,” Smith said.

Hutchison nodded. “You shouldn’t eat a lot of liver if you’re on a low-carbohydrate diet,” he said.

Then they both attacked it with their forks.

Venter and Smith first met at a conference in Spain in 1993, when Smith approached Venter after a lecture. Venter was just 46, but he was already preceded by controversy. He had recently left the N.I.H. to map gene fragments in his own lab and was licensing the results to a private company, which raised alarms about privatizing life. After his lecture, Venter recalled over dinner: “Ham came up, and his first statement was, ‘Where are your horns?’ And I said, ‘What?’ He goes: ‘You’re supposed to be the devil. Where are your horns?”’

Smith let out a guffaw. “Well,” he said, “he had inflamed a lot of the academics!”

Within months, Smith had joined Venter’s nonprofit, and in 1995, they completed the first genetic sequence of a bacterium, expanding on the work at Sanger’s lab two decades earlier. As a follow-up, they reached out to Hutchison, who was studying another bacterium at the University of North Carolina, and offered to map its genome for him. Two days later, Hutchison mailed a vial of DNA to Venter and Smith. “If that was to happen now,” Smith said, “it would have been three months and a bunch of lawyers.” Hutchison shrugged. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said.

Venter and Smith worked quickly. Using the method they developed for the first bacterium, they completed a genetic map for Hutchison in three months. But as all three men studied the second genome, which was only a third the size of the first, they began to wonder how much smaller a genome could get. What was the fewest number of genes that could sustain a free-living organism?

“I think any good inquisitive scientists in our position would have asked those same questions,” Venter said. “But how do you get there? The limits of molecular biology don’t give you enough tools.” Working together, they began to winnow down the genome by inserting snippets of DNA that interrupt gene function, on the theory that any gene that could be disrupted without killing the cell must not be essential. In 1999, they published a paper in the journal Science describing “1,354 distinct sites of insertion that were not lethal,” and speculating that more than a quarter of the bacterium’s DNA might be superfluous. But there was still no way to be sure — no way to knock out all the nonessential genes at once and see if the organism survived. In the final sentence of their 1999 paper, they proposed a novel solution: “One way to identify a minimal gene set for self-replicating life would be to create and test a cassette-based artificial chromosome.”

Create a chromosome. This was still far beyond the reach of science, and in hindsight, marks one of the earliest references to synthetic biology as we know it today. But by the time the paper appeared, in December 1999, Venter and Smith had turned their attention to the human genome project at Celera, which would consume their attention for three years. Looking back, Venter says, “the human genome was a detour.” As soon as the Celera map was complete, they returned to the synthetic project. In 2003, they developed a new method to assemble fragments of DNA and built their first virus; when that worked, they scaled up to bacteria, ultimately writing their names and quotes in its code, but the real prize was, and remains, to build the stripped-down organism they first proposed in 1999 — a free-living bacterium with less DNA than any in nature. It would not only test their theories about essential genes but would also provide an ideal framework for future organisms. Once they had the minimal genome, they could use it as a chassis to attach other genes: maybe a component to feed on sulfur or a module to generate hydrogen or both.

“That’s why it’s so valuable,” Venter said. “If we’re going to design really complex biological machinery, it has to have these fundamentals.”

But the minimal genome may raise an even more fundamental question, one that touches on the nature of innovation itself. When we think about technological change, most of us view progress through a narrow lens: we imagine new gadgets and devices that will streamline our modern lives, bringing the most technically advanced civilization in history to new heights of technical advancement. Yet the innovations that really matter in the long term may not have much to do with advancement at all. They may have less to do with improving our own standards of living than with extending those standards around the world. As the global population continues to rise, the greatest technological challenge we face may be to avoid leaving large tracts of the earth behind. The synthetic biology that Venter proposes, using a minimal genome as a platform to make advances in food, fuel, medicine and environmental health, could backfire into a biological calamity, but it could also offer the most transformative approach to a medley of problems with no apparent solution.

“Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear,” Venter said. “We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.” By this, he didn’t mean growing apples in a Petri dish. He meant producing bulk commodities like corn, soy and wheat, that we use in processed products like tofu and cereal. “If you can produce the key ingredients with 10 or 100 times the efficiency,” he said, “that’s a better use of land and resources.”

As we enjoyed a decidedly real dinner of lobster and fresh vegetables, Venter explained that he was just days away from trying the first synthesis of a minimal genome. For two years, even as the team at S.G.I. has been working to cultivate algae, the institute has been poring over research to design a new genome. Eventually, the process grew tedious. “Up to three weeks ago,” Smith said, “we were on a very gradual course, and we were looking at a long time to get the thing completed. So Craig says, ‘Damn it, let’s make a guess, and synthesize the darn thing based on what we know, and maybe it’ll work!’ ”

Venter laughed. “I call it the Hail Mary Genome.”

Just days earlier, he said, they completed two designs — one led by the office in Maryland, the other by Hutchison’s team in California. In the days ahead, they would begin assembling both. If either worked, it would represent the smallest genetic code of any free-living creature on earth, one that would be impossible to dismiss as a copy. Even as we sat at the dinner table, it was possible that Venter, Smith and Hutchison already had it; that somewhere in their lab, they held the design for the first custom organism made from synthetic DNA.

Hutchison said he was encouraged that the two drafts overlapped. “There are about 30 genes different between the two,” he said.

Smith grinned. “I’m gonna go with Clyde’s draft,” he said.

“Well, mine is smaller,” Hutchison said. “I think maybe we’re going to pick some of the pieces from one design and some from the other.”

“We’re also trying to re-engineer the genome in a much more logical fashion,” Venter said. “We’re doing it in the form that, if there was a God, this is how he would have done it.”

“Evolution is very messy,” Smith added.

“We’re trying to clean it up,” Venter said.

“What’s the time horizon?” I asked.

“I have some ideas that, within the year — ” Hutchison began.

Venter shook his head. “Before the end of summer,” he insisted.

Hutchison chuckled.

“It might be the end of summer,” Smith said.

“It’s going to be the first rationally designed genome,” Venter said.

“Actually, my preference would be not to do the fine needlework,” Smith said. “I would just take the very largest 30 or 40 clusters and remove those.”

“We can do that,” Hutchison said.

“Let’s do it,” Smith said. “The hell with the rest of them.”

Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the state of U.S. biodefense preparations .

Editor: Joel Lovell

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• What Is Cinema?
• Newsletters

The Next Climate Change Calamity?: We’re Ruining the Microbiome, According to Human-Genome-Pioneer Craig Venter

By David Ewing Duncan

All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.

“Human activity is causing a huge imbalance in the global microbiome,” said Craig Venter in his low, rumbling voice. As usual, he was not mincing words. It was 2018. Venter and I were sitting on the deck of Sorcerer II, his 100-foot sailboat, sipping coffee on a cold, misty morning in the Gulf of Maine. Slow, looping waves surrounded the boat as dolphins, off the starboard, leaped up and down in great arcs, their sleek, gray bodies lathered in foam.

What Venter meant is that fossil fuels and other pollutants aren’t just messing with polar bears and Monarch butterflies. They are also changing the invisible world of tiny organisms that sustain life as we know it, something that’s integral to what Rachel Carson called “the fabric of life” in her seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, an indictment of humans’ folly in polluting their own environment.

This warning has become Venter’s clarion call too. It is a central theme of a new book that he and I have cowritten called The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome, which lays out the compelling evidence of how Homo sapiens are causing the micro-fabric of our lives to come apart at the seams.

Most non-scientists know little or nothing about this existential threat. And though I’d heard dribs and drabs about it as a science writer, it wasn’t until that damp morning on Venter’s boat that I truly understood the urgency of the matter. At the time, Venter, then 70, was nearing the end of a series of ocean voyages begun in 2003 to collect samples of seawater brimming with microbes, a quest that rival scientists had originally called a fool’s errand. Eventually sailing 75,000 miles, Venter had defied naysayers by taking on board Sorcerer II hundreds of barrels of seawater and then genetically sequencing the billions of microbes each sample contained—a project that ended up reshaping what science now knows about these tiny creatures, which outnumber the known stars in the universe, and connect all life on Earth.

Say hello to the microbiome —the planet’s bacteria, viruses, fungi, and microscopic animals—which have comprised Venter’s playground for the past 30-plus years. More persuasively than anyone, he has proven that these very small creatures are literally everywhere on Earth: in the atmosphere, deep in the ground, in glaciers, on every rose, and in every beating heart of every animal. Some 39 trillion of them are living inside and on your body right now, and you wouldn’t live very long without them. Research suggests they can impact your health and your moods. They might even influence who you fall in love with, the future health of babies, and how long you will live. And that’s just a small part of their outsized impact on us along with every other species of animal or fauna, and how they all relate to each other.

If you’ve seen either of the Avatar films, microbes are akin to the real-life version of the blue glowing goo that links all life on the movie’s fictional moon, Pandora. Except that microbes don’t glow, and they aren’t blue. But they are the life force of our planet and have been since they first appeared around 3.5 billion years ago. Microbes are why we have an oxygen atmosphere, due to the fact that some of them—microbial phytoplankton in the oceans—“inhale” carbon and “exhale” O2, producing perhaps 60% of all terrestrial oxygen.

All life, including you, evolved from the earliest microbes. And all life is dependent on them for everything from helping you digest that raspberry smoothie you just drank to the bacteria that gobble up and break down every creature that dies and subsequently recycling those chemical components into nutrients for new life.

Craig Venter has been called everything from prickly and arrogant (and worse) to a genius. In the 1990s, he famously led an upstart team that challenged and probably beat a much larger and better-funded federal program to sequence the first complete DNA of a human being. (The race to finish the first map of a human genome was officially declared a tie in 2000 by then President Bill Clinton ). In 2010, Venter achieved another huge milestone: creating a human-made genome from scratch, which he inserted into a bacterium that then popped to life. This breakthrough so alarmed President Barack Obama that the White House ordered an urgent assessment of the ethics of designer DNA and the advent of “synthetic biology.”

Venter didn’t accomplish any of this humbly or quietly. He has spent a career overturning the apple carts of scientific orthodoxies and then facing down uproars of protest with an I-told-you-so swagger and often brilliant flourishes of science and technological innovation. For instance, he has unabashedly compared his explorations into the microbiome of the oceans to the young Charles Darwin’s voyages of the 1830s. For biologists, this is a bit like comparing oneself to the Almighty, an attitude that also hasn’t sat well with some in the scientific establishment who have bristled at his provocative ideas and abrasive style, even though he has often been right.

“Craig is a very mercurial and a very tough personality,” observed Ari Patrinos, formerly a senior administrator at the US Department of Energy, which helped fund many of Venter’s projects, “which is not a negative trait, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s always been a tremendous strength of personality and commitment to the ideas that he’s had. I honestly don’t think he would have been half as successful if he had tried to make peace with people.”

In early 2018, after covering Venter as a science writer for 20 years, I was in his office in La Jolla interviewing him for another project when he asked me to join him in coauthoring a book about his adventures in microland. This launched a four-year adventure in trying to get him to sit still long enough to chat about the book—in between racing vintage sailboats off Nantucket, four-wheeling on his desert ranch near San Diego, and drinking martinis in his sprawling house on the California coast in La Jolla. As a rule, when I pushed him to discuss pure science, he defaulted to deflection, preferring to talk about his sailing adventures on Sorcerer II . Like the time he was nearly eaten by sharks in the Galapagos. Or the day his ship was boarded by armed gendarmes in the Indian Ocean.

“Am I a bit of an adrenaline junky?” said Craig, bearded, bearish, perpetually sunburned. “Yes.”

I also witnessed him getting emotional one night in his La Jolla home when a close friend called to inform him that the friend’s wife, also a friend of Venter’s, had died. As the sun was setting in streaks of orange and red over the Pacific, time seemed to stop as he received the bad news. His face became stoic, with a hint of Old Man and the Sea, a chiseled visage I had glimpsed now and then when he was in deep concentration, captaining Sorcerer II . He quietly hung up and I swear I saw a tear.

With persistence, I was able to piece together what he and his team on Sorcerer II had accomplished during 15 years of voyages that took them from the Black Sea to the North Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda. The routine started with research assistants dropping a pump and special sensors into the sea to measure salinity, temperature, and other ocean metrics. Drawing in around 200 liters of water, the assistants would then ferret out the tiny microbes by straining the samples of seawater through finely meshed filters mounted in the stern. The filters would then be frozen and sent back to Venter’s institute, early on in Rockville, Maryland, and later based in La Jolla, where researchers sequenced and analyzed the treasure trove. Their goals and those of thousands of independent researchers that have used the Sorcerer II data were varied: looking for clues as to how many of these tiny organisms were out there, what they did, and how they were evolving over time; plus insights into developing new sources of energy, drugs, and cleaner industrial chemicals; and ultimately clues to the origins of life itself.

Meeting with dozens of scientists for the book, I also heard very disturbing findings about climate change. Call it a “microbial inconvenient truth,” to borrow from former Vice President Al Gore ’s book and films about carbon buildup in the atmosphere. To get a sense of the small-scale changes in the environment, try thinking about what happens when you binge on fast food and upset the balance of microbes in your gut. You get sick.

This is what we’re doing to the microbiome of the Earth as humans pour the chemical equivalent of fast food into the atmosphere and the oceans—which, among other things, is putting enormous pressure on critical, planet-wide systems that, in the coming decades, could face collapse.

Take the so-called ocean biological carbon pump, which uses phytoplankton to suck in 25–30% of the carbon in the air and produces most of the oxygen we breathe. Scientists are finding that larger phytoplankton are dying off, possibly from increases in the ocean’s temperature and from choking on all that carbon. The flow of nutrients that feed phytoplankton—and fish and other aquatic organisms—are shifting, while pollution from fertilizers and other chemicals flowing from rivers into the oceans are causing dead zones where few or no fish and other macro-life can survive. A dead zone below the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico is now almost the size of New Jersey. And it’s growing.

The assault on the microbiome is also contributing to the death of coral reefs, in part because climate change is impacting bacteria that live symbiotically with the coral and are responsible for their vibrant colors, and for keeping the reefs healthy. Climbing ocean temperatures and pollution can cause coral to eject these bacteria, leading to reefs blanching and dying as they turn from colorful to white. In short, the planet’s ecological health is being potentially endangered by the ravaging of the microscopic building blocks that affect every element of the environment at large.

This reminds me of something else Rachel Carson wrote 60 years ago in *Silent Spring—*that nature, in the face of the “chemical barrage” being thrown at it by humans, was “capable of striking back in unexpected ways,” something we’re seeing evidence of everywhere right now. Not only with things we can see and feel, such as the furnace-like heat that has been enveloping the globe this summer—plus melting glaciers, super storms, and all the rest—but also in the world of the Very Small.

By Kase Wickman

By Chris Murphy

By Bess Levin

“Most of us have such a human-centric view of the world,” Venter told me not long before we took off to sail the Gulf of Maine—a rare moment when this consummate man of action waxed philosophical—“like the Earth was made for us, and it will keep supporting us no matter what we throw at the environment. It’s not very smart of us. We can’t live in a methane atmosphere, and we can’t live with too much CO 2 . But that isn’t really given much thought by most people, or by politicians, which is kind of disastrously wrong.”

In the boat on that gray afternoon, Venter reiterated this thought as he gazed out at the sea. He then drew quiet, turning his head to survey the vast panorama around us, a liquid desert with dunes made of H 2 O that seemed alive as the surface pitched and crested, lifting the ship, and then dropping it in a steady rhythm as the swells grew in intensity.

“A storm is coming,” he finally said, sitting still for a fraction of a second longer before jumping into action to prepare for yet another squall bearing down on him.

Portions of this essay are adapted from The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome, which will be published on September 12, 2023, by Harvard University Press. The book is copyrighted by © JCVI; sections herein are used with permission.

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

The Dream House That Became a Nightmare on Hollywood Boulevard

Lorraine Nicholson’s Childhood at the Playboy Mansion

How a Murder Spree Collided With Hollywood’s Punk Revolution

Inside Trump’s Pants-Pissingly Terrifying Plans for a Second Term

Who Were the Swans? A Deep Dive into Truman Capote’s Best Frenemies

Queen Elizabeth’s “Awkward” Evening With the Kennedys

From the Archive: The Bettencourt Affair (2010)

Stay in the know and subscribe to Vanity Fair for just $2.50 $1 per month.

David Ewing Duncan

By David Canfield

By Chiara Marinai and Britt Hennemuth

By Savannah Walsh

By Charlotte Klein

• Utility Menu

FAS Division of Science

• Generative AI
• Suggestion Box

Harvard Science Book Talk: J. Craig Venter, in conversation with Dimitar Sasselov, "The Voyage of Sorcerer II : The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome"

Date: .

J. Craig Venter is founder, Chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a nonprofit research organization. He is cofounder of the biotechnology companies Celera, Synthetic Genomics, and Human Longevity, Inc. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has received numerous public honors and scientific awards, including the US National Medal of Science.

Dimitar Sasselov is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and the Founder and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, a multidisciplinary center bridging scientists in the physical and in the life sciences, intent to study the transition from chemistry to life and its place in the context of the Universe.

For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see  https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks .

• Grant Notifications and Deadlines (5)
• International Research & Fieldwork
• Research Computing & Informatics
• Research Management Series
• Science Public Lecture Series (3)

More From Forbes

Craig venter mapped the genome. now he's trying to decode death.

This story appears in the February 27, 2017 issue of Forbes. Subscribe

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

THE WORLD'S MOST EXTREME physical exam starts in the world's plushest exam room, complete with a couch, a private bathroom and a teeming fruit plate. It will be my home for an entire day. First come the blood tests, vial after vial. Then two 35-minute sessions in an MRI tube, where REM and U2 try to drown out the clanks as the machine takes pictures of my entire body. There's an ultrasound of my heart. Salade Niçoise for lunch. A stool sample. A cognitive test in which letters flash on a computer screen at a dizzying pace. And a CT scan of my heart as well, which originally seemed so over-the-top for someone my age that I tried to get out of it.

"In Vietnam, I used to do autopsies on 18-to-22-year-olds, and a lot of them had cardiovascular disease," J. Craig Venter, the architect of the process, says with a shrug, before adding, ominously, "We find things. The question is what you do with it."

Gene genius Craig Venter has raised $300 million for a new startup. Credit: Ethan Pines for Forbes.

Yes, it's that Craig Venter, the man in the late 1990s who, frustrated by the slow progress of the government-funded Human Genome Project, launched an effort that sequenced human DNA two years earlier than planned (he was subsequently the first human to have his complete DNA sequenced). He hasn't slowed down since. He sailed around the world in a voyage inspired by Darwin's journey on the Beagle, discovering thousands of new species along the way. He has created synthetic life and started three companies, and was almost a billionaire before being fired from one of the most promising, Celera Genomics.

Now he's back with his most ambitious project since his historic breakthrough 17 years ago. He's raised $300 million from investors including Celgene and GE Ventures for a new firm, Human Longevity, that's trying to take the DNA information he helped unlock and figure out how to leverage it to cheat death for years, or even decades.

Core to the effort is the $25,000 executive physical, branded the Health Nucleus, that I'm taking (disclosure: I got tested for free). It's certainly very thorough--and, to many doctors, precisely the wrong approach, owing to all the false positives. "Study after study of various kinds of screening measures has shown they do more harm than good," says Steven Nissen, the chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic. "You do a total body MRI and you're lucky if you don't find something. I don't think it's good medicine."

Venter scoffs. "We're screening healthy people, and a lot of physicians don't like that," he acknowledges. "My response is: How do you know they're healthy? We use a definition of health out of the Middle Ages: If you look okay and you feel okay, you're deemed healthy. We have a different way of looking at people."

Now 70, Venter cites himself. Last year, he underwent his own physical and says he found prostate cancer, which was removed last November. The man he has called his "scientific muse," Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, 85, found he had a deadly lymphoma in his lung. It has also been treated, and Smith says his prognosis is good.

The famously gruff Venter is entirely comfortable ticking off the establishment, no matter what that establishment is, and the feeling is mutual. His DNA breakthrough was one of the great scientific accomplishments of the 20th century, yet he never won a Nobel Prize. Academics view him as someone interested in profits over science. "He's a very insecure person who compensates by coming across as very arrogant and aggressive," says one former collaborator. Similarly, Venter's discoveries have upended industries, yet his business track record, including a brief flirtation with billionairehood, is checkered, as connections to past backers and bosses have gone up in flames. "He has irritated a lot of people," says Harvard genetics professor George Church, a Venter fan. "It's a pity."

Thus, Human Longevity offers Venter a last chance to square his legacy, awe the scientists and make billions in the process, all the while shaking the foundation of a topic that precisely 100% of homo sapiens have a keen interest in: how and when each of us will die.

Venter tending to patients in Vietnam as a Navy corpsman.

VENTER HAS DISPLAYED POTENTIAL, BOTH achieved and unrealized, almost since birth. Growing up in Millbrae, California, near what was emerging as Silicon Valley, he had such bad grades that by high school his worried mother sometimes checked his arms for track marks. The first glimmer of his future success was in swimming. He was initially mediocre, but when a coach sent him home for the summer with tips, his competitive streak kicked in. He spent three months training furiously and never again lost a race. "Had things been different I would have been competing for the Olympics," Venter says. "But Lyndon Johnson changed that for me with the draft."

Swimming unlocked his potential, but Vietnam made him who he is. At age 20 he served as a Navy hospital corpsman, triaging troops who came back from battle, including the Tet Offensive. Deciding who would live and who would die was so traumatic that he says he considered suicide and swam far out to sea intending to drown. He says he had a change of heart a mile out after a shark prodded him. But he'd go through Vietnam again. "Knowing the outcome and what it did for my personal growth, I would force myself to do it again if I had the choice," Venter says.

After he returned to the States, he went to community college, then the University of California, San Diego, where he initially wanted to be a doctor but discovered science. He eventually completed his Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology, became a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976 and, in 1984, joined the National Institutes of Health.

Watch on Forbes:

At the NIH the themes that would define his career locked into place: productivity, perceived greed, the conflicts between pure science and industry money. Using a new technology, he discovered thousands of human genes. The NIH made the unprecedented decision to patent them in his name, and colleagues blamed Venter, calling him greedy. Nobel laureate James Watson said he was "horrified." Venter insists he was always against the patents but that the NIH did it anyway.

Frustrated, he started a nonprofit institute in 1992, with a unique model. He raised money from venture capitalists, on the condition that he share his data with a for-profit company, Human Genome Sciences, before he published it. The relationship ended unhappily in 1997 because of arguments over data disclosure, with Venter walking away from $40 million in research funding. "I paid a lot of money to get rid of [Human Genome Sciences]," Venter says.

But in 1995, Venter's institute made a real breakthrough: the first genome, or map of the genetic code of an organism, in this case a type of bacterium. It was a suggestion from Ham Smith. They had met at a scientific conference in Spain in 1993 and gone out drinking, starting a two-decade-plus collaboration. Foreshadowing his later race with the Human Genome Project, Venter and Smith's bacterial genome map beat similar projects in academia by many months.

That led a California unit of lab equipment maker Perkin-Elmer, which made DNA sequencers, to approach Venter. If he could sequence a bacterial genome, why not use the company's newest machines to sequence a human genome?

Charles Darwin’s 1831 voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle helped lay the groundwork for his theory of ... [+] evolution. In 2004, J. Craig Venter set off on his own circumnavigation of the globe aboard his 100-foot sailboat, Sorcerer II, to identify millions of previously undiscovered genes . Map: Jack Molloy for Forbes.

Venter couldn't say no, which led to Celera Genomics' founding in 1998. It not only succeeded in overtaking the $3 billion Human Genome Project, an international consortium funded largely by the U.S. government, but it also mapped the genomes of the fruit fly and the mouse, both important laboratory animals. In the process, Venter angered scientists globally, aghast that such research would be driven by profit rather than knowledge. At the time, James Watson reportedly became so enraged he compared Venter to Hitler, asking colleagues who they were going to be--Chamberlain or Churchill?

But the pressure of private enterprise ultimately spurred results, both at Celera and the public group, which improved their methods and accelerated their research. As a result, the two groups jointly announced they had mapped the entire human genome--an achievement that our grandkids will be reading about in their textbooks--at the White House on June 26, 2000.

In the age of the dot-com boom, Celera became a highflier, raising $855 million in a stock offering in February 2000 and peaking at a market capitalization of $14 billion just before the entire market started to collapse in March. Venter's stake briefly surpassed $700 million. He says he gave half his shares to his nonprofit foundation, which then sold half of them, netting more than $150 million, which has funded his science ever since.

It was a necessary scientific nest egg. Celera struggled to invent drugs and diagnostic tests based on its pioneering research, and Venter bickered constantly with the board. They wanted Celera to become a pharma giant and invent medicines in-house. Venter simply wanted to be a scientist and sell other companies his data. He was fired in January 2002, days before a quarter of his stock options would vest. "Being fired in the way it was done was about as slimy as anybody could do it," Venter says. Celera limped along until 2011, when it was sold to Quest Diagnostics for $344 million. ( Forbes estimates that Venter's current net worth, based on his stakes in his two startups, is $300 million.) Venter's baby had essentially been sold for parts.

Venter and his poodle, Darwin. Credit: Ethan Pines for Forbes.

WITH HUMAN LONGEVITY, VENTER HOPES TO solve the problem that ultimately limited the efficacy of Celera and the Human Genome Project. Those two groups produced an "average" DNA sequence. That's incredibly important for a science textbook, but for individuals, it's the differences--how one person's genes are different from another's, leading to different noses, eye colors and, yes, diseases--that matter.

Venter says that, thanks to new technology, he can generate the data that can determine those differences. At Celera, Venter loved to show off his 25,000-square-foot rooms of DNA sequencing machines. But just one modern desktop DNA sequencer is as powerful as a thousand of those rooms and can map a person's genome in days for about $1,000. The original Human Genome Project took more than a decade and at least $500 million to do the same thing. (Illumina, the San Diego firm that makes the desktop sequencers, is a big investor in Human Longevity.)

Human Longevity initially sequenced DNA from 40,000 people who had participated in clinical trials for the pharmaceutical companies Roche and AstraZeneca. Venter says this work has led to the discovery of genetic variations that can be found in young people but not older ones--meaning the young folks had genes incompatible with surviving into old age. Figuring out what these genes do could be the kind of breakthrough that would turn the promise of genome sequencing into a lifesaver.

Venter decided that he also needed a study of people that could collect even more data than you can get from a clinical trial. Hence, the $25,000 physical. And because people pay, it's not only a source of data but also a revenue generator. At the moment, close to 500 people have gone through the physical. Venter hopes to be able to serve 2,000 annually as early as this year, which would generate $50 million in revenue. This isn't exactly covered by Medicare. The market, for the moment, will be the wealthy and the occasional company looking out for key executives--the promise of health as the ultimate luxury item.

Doctors hate it. "I'm massively skeptical," says Benjamin Davies, a urologist at the University of Pittsburgh. "We've been down this road of investigating healthy patients, and it's been a sordid road." He points to a recent study that used CT scans to screen for lung cancer: 60% of patients needed follow-up tests, but only 1.5% had cancer. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said Venter's work sounded like "fascinating science," so long as the people taking the physical understand that this is research, not medicine.

Venter believes the problem with earlier screening tests is that they give too little data, not too much. He is his own evidence. He was the first person to get his DNA sequenced, and the results made him think his risk for most types of cancer was low. When he got prostate cancer, he asked his researchers why. They found what he calls "the likely perpetrator."

It's a change in the way his body responds to the hormone testosterone. Testosterone works by tripping a cellular receptor (think of it as a switch). The gene for that receptor is more effective if it has fewer "repeats" (bits of repeated, garbled genetic code). Testosterone makes prostate cancer grow, so a man with 22 repeats and an inefficient receptor has a lowered risk of the disease. Venter's androgen receptor had just six repeats.

"Basically, I have a supersensitive testosterone receptor," Venter says. "Everybody thought I had balls of steel. In fact, I have only six repeats in my androgen receptor."

But Venter's constant search for more data about his own biology also made the problem worse, illustrating one of the true dangers of something like his $25,000 physical. Years before, Venter learned that his testosterone levels were low and decided to take testosterone supplements. (Most doctors don't recommend doing this.) That almost certainly made his tumor grow faster.

About 40% of Health Nucleus' patients have found out they have something serious. Some, like Ham Smith's lung cancer, absolutely needed to be treated. Venter insists Smith's tumor might have killed him had it been discovered a few weeks later. But for most of Human Longevity's patients, the results are not so clear-cut. I'm lucky: My MRI results showed nothing save that my hippocampus, a part of the brain that forms memories, is of only average size. (My DNA sequence isn't in yet.)

I've been thinking a lot about what I would do if I'd learned about a tumor or an aneurysm, and whether this whole endeavor is a bad idea. But I also haven't been able to get myself to regret going through it. Knowledge about yourself is a very seductive offer. It's one that Venter hopes will give him the data to finally deliver on the genome's promise.

SIDEBAR: ARTIFICIAL LIFE

The dream of understanding life well enough to create it from scratch sounds like something out of Frankenstein. But Craig Venter is getting there, partly using investor money to fund the work. "There's no government funding to make a synthetic species," he says.

In 2010, a team led by Venter that included his closest lieutenant, Hamilton Smith, and synthetic-biology wunderkind Daniel Gibson synthesized a genome for the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides but with slight changes: their names and a James Joyce quote, all translated into a DNA code. Then they inserted the synthetic DNA into a bacterium and its original genome was destroyed. The cell functioned with the new, man-made DNA.

They've since made another bacterium whose genome has been edited to lack any extraneous genes. Researchers thought bacteria needed only 250 genes to stay alive, but Venter's team found its germ needed 473--and nobody knows what 149 of them do. The resulting minimal genome could be useful for understanding which genes are really important.

But there have already been commercial applications for this work. Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI) was founded around them in 2005. In 2009 Exxon Mobil pledged up to $300 million to create algae that can produce a biofuel that is cheaper than gasoline.

Other projects involve drug manufacturing (including a project to rapidly prototype experimental vaccines), a partnership with Johnson & Johnson in drug research and an effort, with the biotechnology firm United Therapeutics, to create pigs whose organs can be safely transplanted into humans. SGI has also made a relatively inexpensive DNA printer that allows bench scientists to easily modify genetic material. It costs between $50,000 and $75,000. Fifty have been sold so far, but SGI chief executive Oliver Fetzer says the near-term addressable market could be worth $500 million. --M.H.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

OPEN MON-SAT 9AM-6PM | SUN 10AM-5:30PM

Search form

• Search results
• Events Calendar
• Tea Time Book Recommendations
• Booked for Lunch
• Weekends with Locals
• Event Replays
• Browse Books/Bestsellers
• Staff Picks
• Autographed Copies
• Create a Wish List
• Pop-Up Warwick’s
• Reading Group Program
• Bulk Book Orders
• LibroFM Audiobooks
• Office Supplies
• Art Supplies
• Party Goods & Gift Wrap
• Corporate Gifts
• Autographed Books for Kids!
• Warwick'sKids Book-of-the-Month Subscription
• New Baby Gift Book Picks
• General Info
• In the News

The Voyage of Sorcerer II

Warwick’s presents J. Craig Venter

Tuesday, september 12, 2023 - 7:30pm pdt.

This event is free and open to the public; free admittance is subject to available space. Limited open seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

On  Tuesday, September 12th at 7:30pm  Warwick's will host   J. Craig Venter as he discusses and signs his new book, The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome .   J. Craig Venter is founder, Chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute , a nonprofit research organization. He is cofounder of the biotechnology companies Celera , Synthetic Genomics , and Human Longevity . A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has received numerous public honors and scientific awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science.

Only books purchased from Warwick's will be signed. Please call the Warwick's Book Dept. (858) 454-0347 for details.

"Will undoubtedly shape our understanding of the global ecosystem for decades to come." ~Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies

A celebrated genome scientist sails around the world, collecting tens of millions of marine microbes and revolutionizing our understanding of the microbiome that sustains us.

Upon completing his historic work on the Human Genome Project, J. Craig Venter declared that he would sequence the genetic code of all life on earth. Thus began a fifteen-year quest to collect DNA from the world's oldest and most abundant form of life: microbes. Boarding the Sorcerer II, a 100-foot sailboat turned research vessel, Venter traveled over 65,000 miles around the globe to sample ocean water and the microscopic life within.

In The Voyage of Sorcerer II , Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued―of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness the microbial genome to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction.

A captivating story of exploration and discovery, The Voyage of Sorcerer II restores microbes to their rightful place as crucial partners in our evolutionary past and guides to our future.

The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean's Microbiome (Hardcover)

• Shopping Cart

Advanced Search

• Browse Our Shelves
• Best Sellers
• Digital Audiobooks
• Featured Titles
• New This Week
• Staff Recommended
• Suggestions for Kids
• Fiction Suggestions
• Nonfiction Suggestions
• Reading Lists
• Upcoming Events
• Ticketed Events
• Science Book Talks
• Past Events
• Video Archive
• Online Gift Codes
• University Clothing
• Goods & Gifts from Harvard Book Store
• Hours & Directions
• Newsletter Archive
• Frequent Buyer Program
• Signed First Edition Club
• Signed New Voices in Fiction Club
• Harvard Square Book Circle
• Off-Site Book Sales
• Corporate & Special Sales
• Print on Demand

• The HBS Channel is the online video archive of our award-winning author event series, featuring recordings of many Harvard Book Store readings and discussions.
• Cambridge Forum
• The Philosophy Cafe
• James Marcus at Harvard Book Store (3/22)
• Michael Kimmage at The Cambridge Public Library (3/25)
• Annie Jacobsen at the Cambridge Public Library (3/26)
• Candida Moss at Harvard Book Store (3/26)
• Kara Swisher at First Parish Church (3/27)
• Rachel Rueckert at Harvard Book Store (3/27)
• Virtual Event: Paul Halpern (3/28)
• Lisa Ko at Harvard Book Store (3/28)
• Rachel Lyon at Harvard Book Store (3/29)
• Jane Kamensky at the Cambridge Public Library (4/1)
• Mark Cecil at Harvard Book Store (4/1)
• Susan Lieu at The Brattle Theatre (4/2)
• Steven Hahn at Harvard Book Store (4/2)
• Matthew Strassler at the Harvard Science Center (4/3)
• Becca Rothfeld at Harvard Book Store (4/3)
• Michael Ponsor at Harvard Book Store (4/4)
• Fareed Zakaria at First Parish Church (4/5)
• Anna Funder at Harvard Book Store (4/5)
• Sarah Braunstein at Harvard Book Store (4/8)
• Michael Norton at The Cambridge Public Library (4/9)
• Henriette Lazaridis at Harvard Book Store (4/9)
• Dr. Sharon Malone at The Brattle Theatre (4/10)
• Nell Freudenberger at Harvard Book Store (4/10)
• Ismar Volić at Harvard Book Store (4/11)
• Anne Lamott at First Parish Church (4/11)
• Myriam J. A. Chancy at Harvard Book Store (4/12)
• Julia Alvarez at The Cambridge Public Library (4/16)
• Ieva Jusionyte at Harvard Book Store (4/16)
• Virtual Event: Salman Rushdie (4/16)
• Leslie Valiant at the Harvard Science Center (4/17)
• Rachel Gordan at Harvard Book Store (4/17)
• Eddie S. Glaude Jr. at The Brattle Theatre (4/18)
• Raisa Tolchinsky at Harvard Book Store (4/18)
• Susan Rubin Suleiman at Harvard Book Store (4/19)
• Lydia Millet at the Cambridge Public Library (4/22)
• Adam Kuper at Harvard Book Store (4/22)
• Marie-Helene Bertino at Harvard Book Store (4/23)
• Millicent E. Brown at Harvard Book Store (4/24)
• Lissa Soep at Harvard Book Store (4/25)
• Dana Mattioli at Harvard Book Store (4/26)
• Elijah Wald at Harvard Book Store (4/29)
• Renée Bergland at Harvard Book Store (4/30)
• Miranda July at The Brattle Theatre (5/15)
• Erik Larson at The Brattle Theatre (5/22)

J. Craig Venter at Harvard Science Center

The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean's Microbiome

in conversation with DIMITAR SASSELOV

• Order Signed Books

Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome J. CRAIG VENTER—founder of the Institute for Genomic Research—for a discussion of his latest book The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean's Microbiome . He will be joined in conversation by Founder and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, DIMITAR SASSELOV.

There are two ticket options available for this event. Venter will sign books after the presentation. 

Free General Admission Ticket: Includes admission for one.

Book-Included Ticket: I ncludes admission for one and one hardcover copy of The Voyage of Sorcerer II .

About The Voyage of Sorcerer II

Upon completing his historic work on the Human Genome Project, J. Craig Venter declared that he would sequence the genetic code of all life on earth. Thus began a fifteen-year quest to collect DNA from the world’s oldest and most abundant form of life: microbes. Boarding the Sorcerer II , a 100-foot sailboat turned research vessel, Venter traveled over 65,000 miles around the globe to sample ocean water and the microscopic life within.

In The Voyage of Sorcerer II , Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued―of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness the microbial genome to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction.

A captivating story of exploration and discovery, The Voyage of Sorcerer II restores microbes to their rightful place as crucial partners in our evolutionary past and guides to our future.

Praise for The Voyage of Sorcerer II

“An epic travelogue, brimming with the excitement of discovery. With characteristic panache, Venter unveils the teeming array of bacteria, viruses, and eukaryotes that crowd our planet’s oceans. His research will undoubtedly shape our understanding of the global ecosystem for decades to come.” ―Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies

“An exhilarating account of how creative science is accomplished. Few would guess just how many microbes live with us and how much they contribute to human health, both directly in our bodies and by making sure the air we breathe supports life. I have always loved bacteria, but after reading this I have an enhanced appreciation of their value to life on this planet. I highly recommend it.” ―Sir Richard J. Roberts, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

“A fascinating inside look at Venter’s historic expeditions that makes the experiences, the analysis, and the transformative discoveries come alive.” ―Margaret Leinen, Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

Mask Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

Dimitar Sasselov

Dimitar Sasselov is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and the Founder and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, a multidisciplinary center bridging scientists in the physical and in the life sciences, intent to study the transition from chemistry to life and its place in the context of the Universe.

J. Craig Venter

J. Craig Venter is founder, Chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a nonprofit research organization. He is cofounder of the biotechnology companies Celera, Synthetic Genomics, and Human Longevity. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has received numerous public honors and scientific awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science.

  There is NO PARKING at the Science Center. For those traveling to the Science Center by car, there is paid public parking in Harvard Square. More info  here .

Unable to attend a Harvard Book Store author event? You can still pre-order a signed book by one of our visiting authors.

While we can't guarantee fulfillment of a signed book pre-order, our authors are almost always able to sign extra books to fulfill such orders.

Ordering a signed book on harvard.com:

• Add the book to your shopping cart and then click Checkout .
• Specify in Order Comments that you want a signed copy of the book.
• Please note: online orders for signed copies must be placed at least one business day before the event. If you are ordering the day of, please call us instead.

Ordering a signed book by phone:

• Call us at (617) 661-1515 and one of our booksellers will take your order. Specify you'd like a signed copy.
• If you are requesting a personalized inscription and/or requesting your book be shipped, we'll need to take down credit card information. If you are planning to pick up the signed book in the store, you can pay on pick-up.

Can I request a personalized inscription? Unless otherwise noted, we are happy to take requests for the author to sign your book to a specific person, but we can't guarantee it. If you do get a personalized inscription, the book will be non-returnable. We will require credit card information when you place the order.

Do signed books cost more? There is no extra fee for a signed book!

Do I have to pick it up in the store, or can you deliver my signed book? As with all web or phone orders, we can hold your book for in-store pickup, or ship it anywhere in the country.

I am planning to attend an author event. Do I need to pre-order a book? No need. We'll be selling books at the event, and nearly all of our events include a signing at the end of the talk.

More questions? Give us a call!

The Harvard Science Book Talks series is a collaboration between the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store. The series features talks by the authors of recently published books on a variety of science-related topics and is open to both the Harvard community and to the general public. Typically, lectures are followed by a book signing with the author and refreshments. Learn more and watch recordings of past talks here . 

Classic Totes

Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more!

Shipping & Pickup

We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail!

Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club!

Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly.

Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore

© 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved

Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138

Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected]

View our current hours »

Join our bookselling team »

We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily.

Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm

Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual.

Map Find Harvard Book Store »

Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy »

Harvard University harvard.edu »

• Clubs & Services

• TripAdvisor

• Testimonials
• Travel Tips

Cruising on the Moscow River

About Me in Short

My name's Arthur Lookyanov, I'm a private tour guide, personal driver and photographer in Moscow, Russia. I work in my business and run my website Moscow-Driver.com from 2002. Read more about me and my services , check out testimonials of my former business and travel clients from all over the World, hit me up on Twitter or other social websites. I hope that you will like my photos as well.

See you in Moscow!

• View full size
• Owner: Moscow Guide & Driver
• Date: May 25, 2013 08:26:00 am EDT
• File name: ALP-2013-0525-036-Cruising-on-Moscow-River-Kremlin-view-from-Sofiyskaya-Embankment.jpg
• Tags: Russia , Spring , Moscow Kremlin , Moskva River , Sofiyskaya Embankment , River Tram , River Boat , Moscow River , Moscow

GPS Location of the Photo

Google maps.

• GPS Map of this album
• GPS Map of Moscow Guide & Driver's pictures

Random image

Snow Kiting on Pleshcheyevo Lake

A snowboarder with a red kite rides on a frozen Pleshcheyevo Lake in Pereslavl-Zalessky under grey skies.

Featured Tags

• 273 photos are tagged with architecture
• 199 photos are tagged with cathedrals
• 305 photos are tagged with churches
• 294 photos are tagged with Dear Clients
• 260 photos are tagged with lights
• 1875 photos are tagged with Moscow
• 306 photos are tagged with Moscow by Night
• 194 photos are tagged with Moscow cityscapes
• 264 photos are tagged with Moscow Kremlin
• 326 photos are tagged with night moscow
• 426 photos are tagged with Orthodox Churches
• 226 photos are tagged with Red Square
• 2538 photos are tagged with Russia
• 209 photos are tagged with twilights
• 350 photos are tagged with Winter

Take one of these exciting tours:

• Moscow Highlights
• Discovering the Golden Ring of Russia
• Arts & Culture Tours
• Moscow by Night tour

Moscow Boat Tour

• Page active

Description

See all the gems of historical and cultural center of the capital in short time and without traffic jams or tiresome walking.

Depending on the itinerary and duration of the Moscow River boat trip, the tour can be 3 or 5 hours.

Highlights of the tour

• St Basil’s Cathedral;
• Stalin skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya (Tinkers) embankment;
• The Kremlin;
• “House on the Embankment” Stalin skyscraper;
• Monument to Peter I;
• The Central House of Artists;
• Christ the Savior Cathedral;
• Gorky Park;
• Moscow State University;
• Russian Academy of Sciences;
• Luzhniki stadium;
• Novodevichy Monastery;
• Kiev railway station;
• Europe Square;
• Moscow City Hall;
• Government House;
• Expocentre Exhibition Complex;
• and other famous sights.

You will learn about the different epochs of the city from the foundation in 1147 till Soviet times of 20 th  century.

Moscow River

Moskva river has the form of a snake and is the main waterway of Moscow, consisting of a cascade of reservoirs. Within the city, Moskva river is 80 km long, 120 m - 200 m wide and up to 14 m deep. The narrowest part of the river is the Kremlin area in the city center, and the most extensive is around the Luzhniki Stadium in the south. 

Bridges in Moscow

Undoubtedly, bridges and embankments are among the most scenic spots and main attractions of Moscow. Plus, they are so romantic.

• Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge –  Great Stone Bridge –  is the main bridge of Moscow . The first stone bridge was constructed here in the 17th century.
• Patriarshy Bridge  is one of the youngest pedestrian bridges, built in 2004. The bridge connects the iconic Christ the Saviour Cathedral with funky Bersenevskaya embankment, extremely popular place among locals for its trendy art galleries, cafes and panoramic views. Patriarshy Bridge used to be a shooting location for ex-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's New Year speech to the nation.
• Borodinsky Bridge,  erected in honor of the 100th anniversary of the glorious victory in the Battle of Borodino (which every Russian kid knows about), a fierce legendary battle during the Russo-French war of 1812.
• Bagration Bridge  one of the  pedestrian bridges with most picturesque views of the Moskva River with its numerous upper-level observation platforms. The bridge was erected to celebrate the 850th anniversary of Moscow city in 1997.
• Krymsky Bridge  used to be in Top 5 Europe’s longest bridges some 100 years ago. The bridge got its name after the ancient Krymsky ford which Crimean Tartars used to invade Moscow in the 16 th  century.

Embankments of Moscow

Moscow river boats 37 embankments, the most popular being Kremlevskaya, Sofiyskaya, Pushkinskaya, Vorobyovskaya and Kolomenskaya.

You can get the most spectacular views of the Kremlin from  Kremlevskaya and Sofiyskaya embankments.

• Pushkinkaya embankment  is the most romantic in Moscow. It meanders along Gorky Park and Neskuchnyi garden and is rich for all kinds of entertainment as well as cozy nooks, including Olivkovy beach, the famous Zeleny theater as well as a pier for river cruisers.
• Vorobyevskaya embankment  is part of Sparrow Hills nature reserve. This place opens a beautiful panorama of the river and city from the observation deck and is considered to be the place for taking serious decisions in life.
• Embankment in Kolomenskoye  Museum-Reserve has a special charm due to its peculiar geographical relief. The boat trip around Kolomenskoye would be the most peaceful in your life.
• Taras Shevchenko embankment  is popular among photographers for its modern Moscow City skyscrapers. Highly recommended for your night boat trip.
• Embankments of Moscow are the pride of the capital. A distinctive feature of each of the promenades is its architecture and beautiful views. In addition, almost all the embankments of Moscow have a rich history and a lot of notable buildings.

Different epochs

Taking a walk along the Moskva River by boat, you will witness the architecture of Moscow from different eras and styles. Archaeological studies indicate that already in the XI century there stood a fortified settlement on Borovitsky hill, which is now called the Kremlin. Little fortress could not accommodate all the residents of the rapidly growing city, and the Grand Duke ordered the construction of a new Kremlin, larger than the former.

Boat trip around Kolomenskoe Park

Moscow river boat trip starts from the pier Klenovy (Maple) Boulevard and provides reat views of Nicholas Perervinsky monastery.

Nicholas Perervinsky monastery was founded at the time of the Battle of Kulikov (1380). The monastery, got its name from the surrounding area – “Pererva”, which can be translated like “tear off” and because of the location –  here it abruptly changed its course, turning to Kolomna, standing on the opposite bank.

Nowadays Kolomenskoye is State Art, Historical, Architectural and Natural Landscape Museum-Reserve, which doors are open to everyone who wants to get in touch with the ancient history of Russia.

Take a break from the big city hustle in the shady parks and gardens of the Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve. Don’t miss a wonderful Church of the Ascension and Tsar Alexey’s Palace in Kolomenskoye!

Monasteries and temples

• Novospassky Monastery
• Founded in the 13th century on the site where now is located the Danilovsky monastery. After a few decades, in 1330, Ivan Kalita moved the monastery onto the Borovitskii hill of the Kremlin. However, in the 15th century, Spassky Monastery again moved, this time to a more spacious place on Krasnoholmskaya waterfront.
• Church of St. Nicholas in Zayaitskom
• Erected in the middle of the XVIII century in baroque style. The building survived after the 1812 fire, but the utensils were destoyed. Parishioners collected donations and restored the temple on their own. In Soviet times, it was closed and re-opened only in 1992.
• Cathedral of Christ the Savior
• The church was originally erected in honor of the victory over Napoleon and was being under construction for long 44 years. Notoriously demolished in 1937 to be a giant swimming pool under open sky. The current building was constructed in 1990s. It is the tallest and one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world.
• The temple was built in 1679-82, during the reign of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich, in late Muscovite Baroque style and can be characterized as bonfire temple. Each gable is a symbol of a heavenly fire.
• Novodevichy Convent
• The most famous concent and monastery in Moscow, presumably founded in 1524. Novodevichy’s status has always been high among other monasteries, it was in this monastery where the women of the royal blood, the wives of Tsars and local rulers of Moscow were kept in prison as nuns.
• St. Andrew’s church  (male acts as Compound Patriarch of Moscow)
• St. Andrew’s church stands right on the slopes of the Sparrow Hills, on the way down to the Moskva River, on the territory of the Nature Reserve “Sparrow Hills”. The monastery is small in size but is very cozy. It’s situated in a quiet courtyard surrounded by temples, fruit trees and flowers.

What you get:

• + A friend in Moscow.
• + Private & customized Moscow river cruise.
• + An exciting pastime, not just boring history lessons.
• + An authentic experience of local life.
• + Flexibility: changes can be made at any time to suit individual preferences.
• + Amazing deals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the very best cafes & restaurants. Discounts on weekdays (Mon-Fri).
• + A photo session amongst spectacular Moscow scenery that can be treasured for a lifetime.
• + Good value for souvenirs, taxis, and hotels.
• + Expert advice on what to do, where to go, and how to make the most of your time in Moscow.

Write your review

• Moscow Tourism
• Moscow Hotels
• Moscow Bed and Breakfast
• Moscow Vacation Rentals
• Flights to Moscow
• Moscow Restaurants
• Things to Do in Moscow
• Moscow Travel Forum
• Moscow Photos
• All Moscow Hotels
• Moscow Hotel Deals
• Things to Do
• Restaurants
• Vacation Rentals
• Travel Stories
• Rental Cars
• Add a Place
• Travel Forum
• Travelers' Choice
• Help Center

Is the Radisson boat tour the best for a river cruise? - Moscow Forum

• Europe    
• Russia    
• Central Russia    
• Moscow    

Is the Radisson boat tour the best for a river cruise?

• United States Forums
• Europe Forums
• Canada Forums
• Asia Forums
• Central America Forums
• Africa Forums
• Caribbean Forums
• Mexico Forums
• South Pacific Forums
• South America Forums
• Middle East Forums
• Honeymoons and Romance
• Business Travel
• Train Travel
• Traveling With Disabilities
• Tripadvisor Support
• Solo Travel
• Bargain Travel
• Timeshares / Vacation Rentals
• Central Russia forums
• Moscow forum

This post has been removed at the author's request.

In the winter? You have no choice.

Radisson boats are the best, yes.

And only radissons operate in winter (because only they can break the ice on the river).

This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity.

• Russian trying to book a hotel in Jerusalem Mar 14, 2024
• Dual Citizen Arrested in Russia Mar 12, 2024
• about clothes Feb 27, 2024
• NOTE - border crossing from Finland into Russia closed Feb 09, 2024
• Snow boots in Red Square Feb 04, 2024
• Travelling to Moscow & Murmansk with toddle in winter Feb 02, 2024
• Anyone traveling from London to Moscow this week ? Jan 27, 2024
• Booking accommodation Jan 11, 2024
• Traveling friends (Designers preferred) :) Jan 05, 2024
• Are shops and things closed during Christmas and New Week ? Dec 15, 2023
• Union Pay debit card Nov 25, 2023
• Traveling to Eastern Russia Nov 17, 2023
• Travel to russia september 2023 tips welcome Oct 17, 2023
• Traveling buddies Sep 10, 2023
• Moscow to St Petersburg train or air?? 32 replies
• New Sapsan Express Train from Moscow to St Petersburg 18 replies
• New year's in moscow 8 replies
• Hop on Hop Off Bus Tour 5 replies
• How do you purchase Bolshoi Ballet tickets at a great price? 2 replies
• Select-a-room.com Are they legitimate? 3 replies
• Weather Moscow and St. petersburg in May 8 replies
• Night train to St Petersburg 3 replies
• ATM Access 12 replies
• Visa needed if on layover at Moscow Airport??????? 15 replies

Moscow Hotels and Places to Stay

• Where can I get initial answers to ANY question?