Craig Venter - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

Venter has been the subject of several biography books, several scientific documentary books, TV documentaries, numerous magazine articles, and many speeches.

Venter is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.

Venter has been the subject of articles in several magazines, including Wired, The Economist, Australian science magazine Cosmos, and The Atlantic. Additionally, he was featured on The Colbert Report on both February 27, 2007, and October 30, 2007.

Venter appeared in the "Evolution" episode of the documentary television series Understanding.

On May 16, 2004, Venter gave the commencement speech at Boston University.

In a 2007 interview with New Scientist when asked "Assuming you can make synthetic bacteria, what will you do with them?", Venter replied:

Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it. Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could make.

Furthermore it suggests that one of the main purposes for creating synthetic bacteria would be to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels through bioremediation.

On May 10, 2007, Venter was awarded an honorary doctorate from Arizona State University, and on October 24 of the same year, he received an honorary doctorate from Imperial College London.

He was on the 2007 Time 100 most influential people in the world list made by Time magazine. In 2007 he also received the Golden Eurydice Award for contributions to Biophilosophy.

On September 4, 2007, a team led by Venter published the first complete (six-billion-letter) genome of an individual human — Venter's own DNA sequence.

On December 4, 2007, Venter gave the Dimbleby lecture for the BBC in London. In February 2008, he gave a speech about his current work at the TED conference.

Venter delivered the 2008 convocation speech for Faculty of Science honours and specialization students at the University of Alberta. A transcription of the speech is available here.

Dr. Venter was featured in Time Magazine's "The Top 10 Everything of 2008" article. Number three in 2008's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries was a piece outlining his work stitching together the 582,000 base pairs necessary to invent the genetic information for a whole new bacterium.

For an episode aired on July 27, 2009, Venter was interviewed on his boat by BBC One for the first episode of TV show Bang Goes the Theory.

On May 8, 2010, Venter received an honorary doctor of science degree from Clarkson University for his work on the human genome.

On May 20, 2010, Venter announced the creation of first self-replicating semi-synthetic bacterial cell.

On November 21, 2010 Steve Kroft profiled J. Craig Venter and his research on 60 minutes.

On April 21, 2011, Venter received the 2011 Benjamin Rush Medal from William & Mary School of Law.

In the June 2011 issue of Men's Journal, Venter was featured as the "Survival Skills" celebrity of the month. He shared various anecdotes, and advice, including stories of his time in Vietnam, as well as mentioning a bout with melanoma upon his back, which subsequently resulted in "giving a pound of flesh" to surgery.