Craig Venter

John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biologist and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for creating the first cell with a synthetic genome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and is now working at JCVI to create synthetic biological organisms. In  1984, he moved to the National Institutes of Health campus where he  developed Expressed Sequence Tags or ESTs, a revolutionary new strategy  for rapid gene discovery. Using ESTs he and his team discovered thousands  of new human genes while at NIH. In 1992 Dr. Venter founded The Institute  for Genomic Research (TIGR), a not-for-profit research institute, where in  1995 he and his team decoded the genome of the first free-living organism,  the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, using his new whole genome shotgun  technique. This led to the rapid  and accurate decoding of hundreds of  important genomes including human viral and bacterial pathogens,  environmental microbes, insect, plant and mammalian genomes.  In 1998, Dr. Venter founded Celera Genomics to sequence the human  genome using new tools and  techniques he and his  team developed. This  research culminated with the February 2001 publication of the human genome  in the journal,  Science. He and his team at Celera also sequenced the fruit  fly, mouse and rat genomes.