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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

"Involved" in the sense that he took the public data, added in a small amount of his own privately generated data and was trying to get the first assembly. The scientists in the Human Genome Project thought he was going to try to patent the whole thing so others would have to pay him. Back then, it was not clear what was and was not patentable.

So the involvement was in spurring the Human Genome Project to race to an assembly, a massive computational problem that hadn't been fully planned for by the public effort:

https://archive.is/2022.02.14-091753/https://www.nytimes.com...

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It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up.

Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem.

So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing

How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project: https://bioperl.org/articles/How_Perl_saved_human_genome.htm...

It was very obvious that it was a computational problem, all DNA analysis was highly computational then, as it is now. His guess was that ~500bp fragments would be enough to get a usable assembly.

But the Human Genome Project's approach of reconstructing larger chunks first was also feasible, and produced an assembly too, with a heroic four weeks effort of a former game programmer who even built cluster software at the same time.

He wasn't the only one who saw the problem computationally. Famously, the mathematician Michael Waterman sat on the other-side of the race for the human genome.

He was known informally as the Venterpillar.

Involved in the sense that his method worked and the one the Human Genome Project insisted on didn't. In the end, they had to use his method to catch up enough that everybody could pretend they did it together and collaboratively -- even though Venter clearly got there first. Venter deserved a Nobel Prize for that and, quite frankly, the Human Genome Project guys deserved a firing.

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