

 An interview with J Craig Venter, the man who sequenced the human genome - jballanc
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/an-interview-with-j-craig-venter-the-man-who-sequenced-the-human-genome/

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daughart
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](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.

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tocomment
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?

~~~
LukeWalsh
Heres something related that I found
[http://users.tpg.com.au/users/horsts/transpermia.html](http://users.tpg.com.au/users/horsts/transpermia.html)

