…is trying to decode death. Though, in reading, it’s more complicated than the headline. I heard him speak at a space conference a few years ago, interesting guy. And I’m fascinated by the hostility from his fellow scientists.
2 thoughts on “Craig Venter”
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It seems that a big part of the problem others have with Venter is simple class bogotry. They want government money, ….nice, secure, stable, government money, given them because they are certified by their universities and hospitals as being “top men”. Their status as that is what should compel others to fund them through government.
Venter by-passed that, and found other ways to fund research, that very apparently from the article are not nearly so financially secure. Worse, at least once, he deprived them of their government money by using that method, cutting the Human Genome Project short, and dumping an number of “top men” out of employment planned to last years longer. The sneers at profit just *reek* with class bigotry.
Yet, without some means to break the monopsony of government hierarchies over buying science, we will see continued deterioration in rates of replication, and increases in rates of “eating fat causes heart disease” type studies. Replication does little to strengthen the career of someone who needs his next grant approved, possibly by a funding peer review board including the guy whose study was shown false by your replication of it. In private funding, replication becomes necessary just to not waste resources in large projects based on flawed studies.
I remember the discussion back then. A lot of people were miffed because he was getting a lot of accolades for “firsts” in DNA mapping but the technique was not reliable enough to have a good quality mapping. The mapping technique worked better when you already had an idea of how the genome looked like, which wasn’t that case back then. So you were basically comparing different things. The quality of the mapping wasn’t the same and I heard they spent a couple years after the public announcement to get the kinks out.
There was also a fuckton of announcements back then of the incredible applications it ended up not having – even today genome testing for disease markers is incredibly bad and gives wildly bogus results with both false positives and false negatives. People end up doing radical procedures for no good reason (he gives an example of taking testosterone to fix a condition he thought he had, only to get a rapidly growing prostate cancer as a result), there are more cases of that like the stupid fashion of doing radical mastectomies without breast cancer being actually diagnosed.
Mind you I think the research is perfectly fine, as research goes, but there’s a lot of snake oil regarding the actual use of the techniques to the point it may lead people to dismiss the field altogether because of the bogosity of it all.