Opinion: Tributes to Craig Venter and the genomics race are missing something important

OpinionFirst Opinion Tributes to Craig Venter and the genomics race are missing something important The race to decode the human genome was never as simple as public vs. private science Manage alerts for this article Email this article Share this article By Zachary UtzMay 15, 2026 Utz is the former archivist of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. Two weeks ago, one of the most important scientists of the 20th century died. Craig Venter was a legend in genomics — a self-styled maverick who made a career of challenging institutional science and its methods and assumptions. His most famous challenge to the scientific status quo came in the late 1990s, when his private company Celera announced it would beat the publicly funded Human Genome Project in the race to generate the first sequence of the human genome. It was one of the top science stories of the 20th century.Advertisement The obituaries that came out immediately after Venter’s passing were — understandably — glowing. The New York Times described how his whole-genome shotgun method “enabled him to erase his rivals’ head start” and suggested that only a shortage of time and money prevented him from “seizing this greatest of scientific prizes.” Instead, the Times wrote, he “agreed, reluctantly, to accept the consortium’s offer of a formal draw.” It’s a hell of a story. And like most compelling stories, it’s true — up to a point. History has a way of doing this. The messiness of a 13-year scientific undertaking, the back-channel negotiations, the philosophical disagreements, the institutional maneuvering — none of that fits neatly into an obituary. So, the narrative gets compressed into something cleaner: a race, two rivals, a photo finish. Venter becomes the scrappy maverick; the National Institutes of Health becomes the slow-moving bureaucracy he nearly outran. It’s satisfying. It also leaves out the most important parts.Advertisement Venter was a genuinely consequential scientist, and his entrance into the genome sequencing story accelerated the entire field. But honoring that legacy doesn’t require flattening it into a simpler arc than it deserves. The real story — the one sitting in the archival record — is considerably more interesting. I know this not just as a matter of historical record, but because I spent years helping to build the archive that contains it. Until April 1, 2025 — a date now known grimly across the NIH campus as the April Fools’ Day Massacre — I worked as an archivist and communications specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the NIH organization created to lead the Human Genome Project. One of the last projects I was working on before the layoffs was focused on exactly that untold story: the behind-the-scenes negotiations, the institutional maneuvering, the carefully choreographed diplomacy that preceded the June 26, 2000, ceremony. It’s the kind of history that lives in archives, not headlines. And with NHGRI and the NIH so thoroughly unwound over the course of the past year, it’s worth asking how much of that record will remain accessible — or whether anyone will be left to tell it. So let’s tell a more complete version of it. Begun in 1990, the Human Genome Project was a 13-year, $3 billion taxpayer-funded initiative — not merely to produce a genome sequence, but to build the entire scientific and ethical infrastructure around one. It involved model organism sequencing, technology development, the establishment of open data standards, and a dedicated program to examine the ethical and social implications of the work. It was, as the press noted at the time, a project of Apollo-landing ambition. The sequence was always the headline, but it was never the whole story. When Venter and his new company Celera announced in 1998 that they would sequence the human genome faster and cheaper using whole-genome shotgun sequencing, the public consortium’s timeline genuinely accelerated. NIH Director Francis Collins acknowledged as much at the White House ceremony in 2000, saying “competition is a good thing. It gets people going.”Advertisement That part of the standard narrative is accurate. What it tends to skip over is the context that made the competition possible in the first place. The Human Genome Project, guided by the 1997 Bermuda Principles, had committed to depositing all of its genomic data into a free, publicly accessible database within 24 hours of generation. This was a foundational philosophical commitment — one that is only possible when a project isn’t beholden to shareholders or a profit model. Celera, by contrast, planned to license access to its data and explored patenting portions of the genome itself. These weren’t just competing business models. They were competing visions of what scientific knowledge is for. And here is the part that tends to get quietly elided in the race narrative: Celera’s researchers used that free public data. The shotgun method Venter championed was genuinely innovative, but it produced gaps that required filling. The publicly generated sequence — the one being given away by the taxpayer-funded project — provided critical scaffolding for Celera’s own work. The Times’ framing suggests two runners on the same track, one of whom found a faster stride. The fuller picture is something more like one effort laying the road while another figured out a more efficient way to drive it. None of that diminishes the ingenuity of what Celera did. But it does complicate the idea that the private effort was operating independently of the public one, or that it could have. What was announced at the White House that day was not a spontaneous shared triumph. Internal memos from the period — part of NHGRI’s historical archive of the Human Genome Project — reveal months of careful planning around the event: how it was managed, who would be involved from each side, even specific words to be used and those to be avoided. “Cooperation,” for instance, was the preferred term; “collaboration” was not. The distinction mattered: Cooperation implied two independent efforts acknowledging each other, while collaboration suggested something more intertwined — and therefore more complicated to explain. That framing landed almost verbatim in the press coverage that followed. It was diplomacy as messaging, and it worked. The story the public received that day was largely the story someone decided they should receive.Advertisement Understanding that doesn’t diminish the achievement. It actually makes it more remarkable: two deeply competing visions of science, briefly pointed in the same direction, for the benefit of everyone. That nuance matters now more than it ever has. The Trump administration has spent the last several months cutting NIH funding, decimating its workforce, and advancing the argument that the private sector can simply absorb what federal science leaves behind. The genome race story gets invoked, implicitly, as evidence: look how much a private company accomplished when it had the right incentives. But Celera’s most celebrated chapter was made possible, in large part, by freely shared public data — data that only existed because the government funded it, and made a principled decision not to charge anyone for it. That’s not a footnote to the story. It’s the story. The portrait of Craig Venter as one of the most consequential figures in the history of genomics is accurate. But every portrait also has a frame, and what sits just outside this one matters. He was a brilliant and trailblazing scientist, who also operated within, and benefited from, a publicly funded ecosystem. That framing doesn’t change the portrait. It completes it. Zach Utz is the archivist at the American Prison Writing Archive at Johns Hopkins University and the former archivist of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. Letter to the editor Have an opinion on this essay? Submit a letter to the editor. genetics, NIH Submit a correction requestReprints Zachary Utz Newsletter The smartest thinkers in life sciences on what's happening — and what's to come Recommended First Opinion May 15, 2026 I’m 73. 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