Anonymousabout 3 hours ago
J. Craig Venter, the combative biologist who turned the sequencing of the human genome into a high-stakes public-private race and later built the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome, died on April 29, 2026, at age 79 from complications of cancer treatment. His career reshaped genomics, synthetic biology, and the politics of scientific data — but his legacy remains contested by the thousands of publicly funded researchers whose work ran parallel to his own.