The race was supposed to take a decade. Craig Venter forced a tie in two.

J. Craig Venter, the genomics pioneer who raced the US government to sequence the human genome and later created the first synthetic cell, died Tuesday in a San Diego hospital. He was 79. The J. Craig Venter Institute said the cause was complications from treatment for a recently diagnosed cancer.

Venter treated biology as code — readable, writable, and ultimately hackable. In 1998, after the Human Genome Project rejected his preferred sequencing method, he founded Celera Genomics, assembled a supercomputer, and raced the federal effort. Two years later, he stood alongside President Clinton and NIH’s Francis Collins in the White House to announce a joint first draft of the genome.

“Today we are learning the language in which God created life,” Clinton declared. Venter, characteristically, said: “I think we will view this period as a very historic time, a new starting point.”

His self-assurance antagonized colleagues. Celera fired him in 2002. A company he co-founded, Human Longevity Inc., sued him in 2018 for alleged trade-secret theft; the case was dismissed. Nothing slowed him for long.

In 2010, his team synthesized an entire bacterial chromosome and booted it inside a living cell — the first synthetic organism. He sailed the world’s oceans on his yacht Sorcerer II, cataloguing microbial diversity and discovering more new genes in a single expedition than science had found in all prior history. He founded or co-founded three companies and two research institutes.

Reflecting on the genome project in 2023, he told the San Diego Union-Tribune: “There have been some successes. But the sequencing of the human genome has yet to provide the sort of advances we were hoping for.”

He once said: “If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life.” By his own standard, he did.

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