Reviews

Praise for A LIFE DECODED:

“Well worth reading for the fascinating perspective it offers on one of the major scientific discoveries of all time.”
- Publishers Weekly

“The accomplished Venter, whose race to be the first to sequence the human genome made him a controversial figure, offers an engaging… story of his life and scientific achievements…the personalities and machinations involved in Big Science make this an engaging read.”
- Kirkus Reviews

When the human genome project needed to drum up excitement, back in the 1980s, Wally Gilbert, the Harvard molecular biologist, pitched it as “the ultimate answer to the commandment ‘Know Thyself’ ”. In this book, J Craig Venter, the genomics pioneer and scientific entrepreneur, takes him literally. Venter, whose private company, Celera, shared the glory of sequencing the human genome with a consortium of government-backed scientists from America and Britain, has used the enormous genome-sequencing power at his disposal to produce a computer file that contains all six billion of the DNA characters he inherited from his mother and father 61 years ago. Click here to read full review.
- The Sunday Times

Praise for J. Craig Venter:

“It’s thanks to Venter, aggressive and hard-nosed as he is, that the world can read the score of the human symphony.”
- Time Magazine

“With Venter, there must always be something new swelling on the horizon… Now we’re sailing into a new evolutionary time… Venter is hardly the only scientist leading us there, but he alone is taking the measure of life’s true diversity and dreaming up new life-forms at the same time.”
- Wired

Surfer, Vietnam War medic, and founder of Celera Genomics, Venter is probably best known for his role in the private sector's sequencing the human genome prior to the federally funded Human Genome Project. His autobiography is a colorful, firsthand account of intense egos and competition among research labs and national governments and at sea, where his J. Craig Venter Institute sponsors a sailboat equipped with sequencing machines to investigate marine microbial populations. While not overly modest, Venter does acknowledge many of his collaborators and paints an intriguing picture of the challenges, complexities, and dilemmas of cutting-edge science and medical research. What may surprise readers is the tentativeness and uncertainty of his conclusions about potential impacts of his genes on his health (one of the genome samples sequenced was his own), but that's the reality of the early developmental stage of today's genome sequencing. Venter argues convincingly that it will take decades to get a big-picture view of what our genes can and will tell us about ourselves. Patrons who enjoyed James Shreeve's The Genome War, John Sulston and Georgina Ferry's The Common Thread, and/or Robert Cook-Deegan's The Gene Wars will find Venter's account a readable, provocative addition to collections.
- Mary Chitty, Cambridge Healthtech, Needham, MA