“I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.”

American biotechnologist and entrepreneur, Venter co-founded Celera Genomics and led the private Human Genome Project. His work revolutionized genomics with the first commercially assembled human genome and pioneering synthetic biology research.