When Craig Venter published the complete sequence of his genome in PLOS Biology in 2007, in some ways, it was old news. Though Venter didn’t admit it until he left Celera as president in 2002, many scientists suspected that the human genome his company sequenced far ahead of schedule, thanks to his groundbreaking shotgun sequencing approach, was his own. (Venter and his colleague Ham Smith supplied the male portion of Celera’s genome.)
But the real news when Venter published his genome (highlighted here as part of PLOS Biology’s 10th anniversary) wasn’t whose genome had been sequenced, but the fact that it had been done.
Read the full, original story here: The First Individual Genome: One Is the Loneliest Number
