Behind the Story: Wil S. Hylton on Craig Venter and God, Craig Venter and DNA Graffiti and Craig Venter and Piles of Cash Wil S. Hylton, a contributing writer for the magazine, profiled the scientist Craig Venter for this week's Innovation issue. He last wrote for the magazine about the state of U.S. biodefense preparations. How did you first hear about Craig Venter? I started hearing about Venter when people started hating him, in the mid-"90s. He'd left the National Institutes of Health after a huge fight over gene patents. His lab was discovering thousands of gene fragments really quickly, and the director of the N.I.H. wanted to patent them, but Jim Watson, who's as big a deal as you can be in science, was violently opposed. That turned into an epic squabble, which eventually led to Watson's quitting the human genome project and the N.I.H. Then Venter left to start his own institute, and began to license his discoveries to a private company, which didn't make matters better. So by the time he decided to race the human genome project, he was already infamous. Somewhere in there, I started hearing about him from other scientists. It gets your attention when you're interviewing some mild-mannered microbiologist and he suddenly begins hurling invective about this satanic force named Venter. You write about the mutual mistrust of academic scientists and privately employed scientists. Do you think Venter would he have been just as happy to avoid commerce had his career played out differently? The tension between public and private science is powerful. As for Venter's place in it, I think it's more nuanced than people realize. He left academics for the N.I.H., then he left N.I.H. in controversy, then he built a company to map the human genome. That was supposed to be his true calling, as a corporate scientist extraordinaire, except that he battled his corporate overseers even more than he battled at the N.I.H. As soon as the human genome map was complete, they fired him. And while he's tried to smooth things with Watson, I don't see him trying to patch things up with his corporate enemies. So I guess the short answer is that Venter wants to do things his way, and it's hard to find a place where that's possible, especially when the price tag runs in the hundreds of millions. Right now, at the institute and new company, he's probably closer than he's ever been, but he still relies on grants from N.I.H. and investment capital from companies like BP and Exxon, and I think all those relationships require a level of compromise that doesn't come naturally to him. Venter briefly mentions God in your article as an analogy for intangibles that other scientists think contribute to life, whereas he believes it's all about DNA. Did you talk to Venter about the question of science versus religion? Many times. It's been interesting over the years to see him become more open about his beliefs. Venter doesn't believe in God. There was a time when he kept that private, and worried that it would muddy the perception of his work, which was a legitimate worry, by the way. It's not trivial that his rival in the human genome project was Francis Collins, who's now the head of the N.I.H. and a devout Christian. So you had this very easy narrative, irresistible to reporters everywhere, about the selfless public scientist who loved God and man, versus the greedy corporate atheist who wanted to buy life. Last fall, I was at dinner with a bunch of his longtime friends and colleagues. They were all on vacation together, paying their own way. One of the guys took the occasion to confess sheepishly that he's a Christian. Nobody ever knew. Venter's eyes got wide, and he glared at the guy, and then he blurted out, "You're fired!" And everybody burst out laughing. Again, those guys are old buddies, so it was nothing but a joke and quickly forgotten. But the fact that Venter was willing to make the joke in front of a reporter struck me as new. Why did Venter write his name into the DNA sequences he created? Does that invite accusations of megalomania? Or is it like an artist signing a painting? It was an immediate criticism, and a fair one. Writing your name into the DNA of an organism sounds an awful lot like graffiti. The idea was to watermark the genome so they could clearly identify it as a constructed piece of DNA. But it touches on a related issue. Not too long ago, Venter revealed that the genome map at Celera was mostly taken from his own DNA, and that's been held up as a sign of his ego ever since. There's a long tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves and taking a dose of their own medicine, if you will. One of Venter's rivals in synthetic biology, the legendary George Church at Harvard, included himself a few years ago in the first trial of his Personal Genome Project. Nobody expressed any concern about that, partly because everybody loves George Church, and partly because it's good science. In fact, Church was asked to include himself by his own ethical oversight group. Somehow when it's Venter, people often see things differently. Did he tell you what kind of secret messages the scientists wrote into the DNA? Apparently it was just a Web address that said something like, "Hey, good work, you're No. Kind of a fizzle. What are Venter's big-picture goals? It's natural to groan and roll your eyes when somebody says they want to save the world, and Venter's probably earned his share of groans and eye rolls. But if the question is what his goals truly are, I think that's it. I don't think it's any secret that he also wants total freedom, tons of money, a fancy house, expensive cars and boats and infinite toys. But I think when he wakes up in the morning, he actually believes he's going to change the world. Which at this point, regrettably, is synonymous with saving it. So for example, he wants to replace agribusiness with food-generating algae, and he wants to design organisms that eat the pollution out of smokestacks, and he'd like to replace large sectors of industrial manufacturing with low-impact biomachinery. That doesn't mean he's not seeking fame and glory and piles of cash. He's doing that too.