American Decades
Venter, Craig 1946-
GENETICIST
Background.
Craig Venter graduated from high school in 1964, with the reputation of being a chronic discipline problem, and moved from San Francisco to Southern California to sail and surf. In 1967, when he was twenty-one, he went to Vietnam as a Navy hospital corpsman. Venter planned to become a doctor after the war and work in underdeveloped countries, but upon earning a Ph.D. in six years, he decided to go into in medical research. He married Claire Fraser, a molecular biologist, and the pair joined the National Institutes Health (NIH).
Research.
In the 1980s Venter was studying genes at the NIH when he came up with a new, faster way to decode DNA by feeding messenger RNA (mRNA), copied into a more stable form known as cDNA, into an automated gene sequencer he had acquired for his laboratory. When Venter published his first paper based on this work, scientists had identified only about four...
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1990's Science and Technology
