Sequencing the Human Genome
Pre-Lecture Interview With the Marine Biological Laboratory:
MBL: Craig Venter, who is President and Chief Scientific Officer of Celera Genomics Corporation, and one of the leading pioneers in the whole genome sequencing--in fact he pretty well turned it on it's ear when he began to move into the private sector from the National Institutes of Health--is wrapping up the 2001 Friday Night Lecture Series for the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Dr. Venter, could you tell us what you would hope that people get out of this lecture this evening?
Craig Venter: Well, I am going to be talking about what led up to sequencing the genome, the process of determining the human genetic code, and what we have learned from it. And what we have learned from sequencing the mouse genome and comparing our genome to that from the mouse and chimpanzee and some other species, just to see what we can tell about ourselves.
MBL: What kind of questions should this raise in other scientists' minds particularly?
CV: I gave a similar lecture to sophisticated scientists, to lay audiences, and they all ask the same questions. People have the same basic curiosity. "What does this mean about my life? What does this mean about humanity? What does this mean about evolution? What does this mean about new therapies?" It is a pretty broad array of questions. It has implications for almost everything in humanity.
MBL: What do you think is the most important thing that it means to individuals?
CV: Well I think the single most important message, particularly with how we interpret this information, is that genetic reductionism doesn't work. We are not the sum total of our genes. We have basically the same gene set amongst the entire human population and then between the human population, and between humans and mice and chimps, and it is the independent regulation of sets of genes, and our own interaction with the environment that determines who we are.
MBL: If we were to come back in 30 years and look at medicine, what would it look like?
CV: Hopefully, 30 years from now we will have a much broader array of types of treatments. We don't understand the function of most of the genes in the human genome, despite how sophisticated we think medicine is. It is not based on a knowledge of our own biology. It is based on very rudimentary knowledge. Most of the discoveries that are going to take place throughout history remain to be made--about how our biology works--so I expect it to look very different now, having a major component of preventative in it, from understanding the disease process better and doing something before the diseases occur.
MBL: Will this get us to the problem that has not been dealt with a lot--cause as opposed to prevention of disease?
CV: Well, to do prevention you have to understand the causes so absolutely.
MBL: What questions of what is happening now are in the minds of young post docs at this point? What do you think it will stimulate them to go look at?
CV: It is hard for me to imagine how exciting it would be to be a young scientist today. I had to spend a decade trying to get a single protein, a single gene. Other people have spent whole careers doing the same. Multiple careers, sometimes, for single proteins. Imagine now starting a career in science where basically all the components are there, are reachable with computers, a starting point to understand how they work together to cause biology. It has to be the most exciting time ever. It is also a great challenge for people, because nobody has been there in front of them. There is no real history. It is a wonderful opportunity to make major headway very, very rapidly just by having some new ideas and a new way to approach things.
MBL: Go back a bit. What attracted you to science and what keeps you there?
CV: Actually, after I got out of the Vietnam War I was planning on going to medical school. I was introduced to biomedical research while I was a student at UC San Diego and I just so enjoyed the discovery process where, by doing experiments, I could uncover new knowledge and some very basic knowledge. My early work was on how adrenalin works on the body. It is amazing [that] in my lifetime that was not known. And so I found, by applying my mind, I could answer fundamental questions that affected things very broadly, and I decided that was the career for me, and abandoned medicine.
MBL: And certainly abandoned the security of medicine, because at the time you started, I suspect the applications for grants....
CV: Yes that was the "Union Card", to get a medical degree then. At the time it seemed like a terrible mistake and everybody told me it was. I am not unhappy how it turned out.
MBL: I guess not. You certainly have done an awful lot for generations to come.
CV: Thank you.
MBL: What do you think will be the next great frontier, beyond genes?
CV: I think the frontier is really understanding the integration of all this information. Each of us has about 100 trillion cells in our body. Each of the cells express different combinations of maybe a quarter of a million proteins. So to truly understand the whole variation there, it would be 250 thousand to the 100 trillionth power of the number of different combinations. I think it is absolutely wondrous that the whole process works. So the genes are like the table of contents of information and I will talk about that more in my lecture.
MBL: Dr. Venter, thank you so very much for giving us your time tonight.
CV: You are welcome. It is my pleasure.
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