In between bites of eggs Benedict, genome guru Craig Venter paused recently to share a sobering lesson he learned in the dreamy waters of Cocos Island in the tropical Pacific.
“The trick to swimming with sharks is to swim with them, as though you are a shark,” he said over breakfast at the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, near his main residence.
“They’ll leave you alone if you aren’t out there looking like food.”
Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla.
(Howard Lipin/U-T File)
This isn’t the image that many people have of Venter. He’s seen as the guy in the white lab jacket. The microbiologist who bitterly competed with a government-led team to sequence the human genome in a race that effectively ended in a tie.
But he is often out in the wild, in exotic places like Cocos, jumping into the ocean from the deck of sailboats. That’s what led to his encounter with sharks. Venter was taking water samples in what turned out to be one of the biggest endeavors of his career, and the basis for his newly published book, “The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome.”
From 2003 to 2018, Venter and a changing cast of researchers roamed the world aboard his 100-foot sailing yacht, Sorcerer II, sampling oceans and waterways for microbes whose DNA will provide a fuller understanding of life on Earth.
Scientists estimate that there are one trillion species of microbes in the world, things like bacteria, viruses and archaea. Only about 10 percent of the organisms have been identified. But it’s known that some of them factor into the production of roughly half of the planet’s oxygen, and enable humans do things as fundamental as digest food.
It’s also been established that some microbes can nurture cancer, which is where things get personal with Venter. In 2016, a new MRI technique revealed that Venter had a form of prostate cancer that was close to metastasizing. It was successfully removed by surgeons.
At the time, he was nearing the end of running his Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) program, whose origins can be traced, in part, to his frustration with scientists who claimed that there are large stretches of ocean that basically aren’t worth studying.
“They were saying things like, ‘There’s very little life in the Sargasso Sea (in the Atlantic),’ ” Venter told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “That’s just illogical to me.”
Human genome research pioneer Craig Venter speaks at a conference on the campus of the University of California San Diego in 2017.
(The San Diego Union-Tribune)
He has been a sailor and a scientist for most of his 77 years. His own research and globe-trotting led him to believe that microbes are pretty much ubiquitous. It helped motivate him to raise public and private money for 15 years worth of expeditions that proved to be fruitful and, at times, dangerous.
During journeys that covered 65,000 miles and included a circumnavigation of the globe, Venter and his colleagues collected tens of millions of microbes, nearly all of which were too tiny to be seen with the naked eye.
Some of the sampling occurred in the Sargasso Sea, the seaweed-strewn world that encompasses the Bermuda islands. In a single barrel of seawater, scientists discovered thousands of different types of microbes. Venter says that the genetic makeup of the organisms was fully or partially sequenced and led to the discovery of about 1.5 million new genes.
“We stopped counting because we felt we’d made our point,” Venter said.
The ocean sampling has been cited and built upon in hundreds of scientific papers, experiments and expeditions. Over time, such work could contribute to the development of new pharmaceuticals. Venter, by his own account, is neither a quiet or humble man. But he is not loudly promising miracles. The results of past research have had a cautionary effect.
“There have been some successes. But the sequencing of the human genome has yet to provide the sort of advances we were hoping for,” said Venter, who remains very active in science despite selling the building in La Jolla that houses his research institute. He sold it last year to UC San Diego, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology in the 1970s.
The story of Sorcerer II — which Venter co-authored with science writer David Ewing Duncan — isn’t as good a book as it should be. The prose is drier than driftwood, which makes it hard for readers to visualize and appreciate what happened.
The book also suffers from the way it was produced. Duncan largely plays the role of a reporter, interviewing the scientists who participated in the various expeditions. He also drew from the ship’s log. Duncan conveys their words — and Venter’s thoughts — through quotes that sometimes feel scripted and incomplete. There also was failure to flesh out dramatic moments, including the ship getting caught in a fierce storm off Portugal that imperiled the crew.
Early on, the book also needlessly rehashes Venter’s stormy competition with the U.S.-led Human Genome Project, which dates back to the late 1990s. It’s a one-sided account that overlooks something important: Both sides benefited from each other’s work. The winner was humanity.
The story could have been a page-turner, as writer James Shreeve showed in the unflinching, insightful and entertaining profile he wrote about Venter during the early days of the project in 2004.
Shreeve’s you-are-there account begins in the lagoon of a South Pacific island with text that says, “The water is as clear as air. Overhead, white fairy terns hover and peep among coconut trees. Perhaps 100 yards away, you see a man strolling in the shallows. He is bald, bearded, and buck naked.”
That man is Craig Venter, whose chatty, sometimes catty and always engaging voice is largely absent from his own book. He admits that “Sorcerer II” could have been so much better.
In a literary sense, he might be able to redeem himself.
Although he spends considerable time moving between two homes in Southern California and two in coastal Maine, he’s still trying to raise research money. Specifically, he’s trying to drum up hundreds of millions of dollars to improve health care for underserved and Indigenous communities — particularly basic, pre-symptomatic testing.
He has no plans to disappear over the horizon in the airplane that he learned to fly during the pandemic,
On a recent evening, while sitting at his home in La Jolla recovering from rotator cuff surgery, Venter said, “I used to say that 70 is the new 50. Now, I say 100 is the new 70.”
Book jacket for “The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome” by J. Craig Venter and David Ewing Duncan.
(Courtesy of the J. Craig Venter Institute)
“The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome” by Craig Venter and David Ewing Duncan (Belknap Press, 2023; 336 pages)
