An interview with J Craig Venter, the man who sequenced the human genome

Venter deserves credit, but for what?

- Shotgun sequencing was invented by Sanger, not Venter.

- Venter used capillary sequencing, like the Human Genome Project (HGP), which is a dead-end technology surpassed by next-generation sequencing and someday single-molecule sequencing. Venter has nothing to do with these technologies.

- Venter's draft genome relied heavily on publicly available data that was generated by the HGP. It's clear (to me) that his draft was probably unpublishable without this additional data.

So really, I think Venter gets a lot of credit he probably doesn't deserve. He really deserves credit for disrupting the HGP. George Church long advocated for technology development rather than the laborious method HGP chose to pursue (http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/HGP.html), but Venter's independent project helped ensure that the HGP would be the first and last human genome sequenced as a grand initiative. Venter's public threat forced the HGP to wrap up and abandon capillary & tiling approaches. Within the decade, we had three "next-generation" sequencing technologies available that could give us genomes in a few weeks at a fraction of the price. Of course, by that time Venter was already engaged in his next project.

It says "it has been estimated that Earth and Mars have exchanged on the order of 100kg of material a year"

Does anyone know where I can read more about that? How would that process be happening today?