From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/j-craig-venter-swashbuckling-scientist-helped-decode-human-genome-dies-rcna342863

Craig Venter is one of the main reasons that the human genome project
came in far under the 10 billion dollar budget and years ahead of
schedule. The Sanger based sequencing technology was invented and in
use, but the world human genome project continued to produce BAC and YAC clones of large pieces of chromosomes and create clone maps and sequence
the clones. Venter understood that the technology could be used to
shotgun sequence random fragments of DNA and assemble large sequence
contigs from the mess. The technology had advanced to the point where
the automated sequencers could produce 500 to 700 base-pairs of sequence
that was enough to sequence through most of the interspersed repetitive transposons. Just ALU transposons are found around every 3,000
base-pairs in the human genome and they are 300 base-pairs in length.
If you don't sequence across the transposon you can't figure out where
in the genome that sequence exists in. All you know is that one end is
inside of a transposon sequence. The automated sequencers could be
fully utilized sequencing random bits of the genome. A lot more
sequence had to be generated, but it could be done faster than
sequencing aligned bits of a BAC clone.

It became a race between Venter's company and the rest of the world, and
in the end they claimed a tie because the rest of the world adopted
Venter's procedures and with more resources caught up. Venter was
associated with saving the US around 7 billion dollars and years of
effort. Venter sequenced his own genome. The company wanted to profit
from what they had done, but they released the genome to the public. It brought up ethical issues in terms of knowing someone's genome sequence because it turned out that Venter had one of the major alleles
associated with Alzheimers at that time, and the APOE allele remains associated with Alzheimers, but his obit doesn't mention Alzheimers.
There was only a 2 to 5 fold increased chance of developing Alzheimers.

Ron Okimoto

--- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2