Going against the grain

J Craig Venter, who has been challenging authority all his life says, "You need big ego to succeed." [Photo provided to China Daily]

J Craig Venter, a biotechnologist and geneticist, who visited Beijing late last year to receive the VCANBIO Award for International Cooperation in Life Sciences and Medicine, talks about how he sees science

Being a scientist means one must challenge existing dogma and authority, says J Craig Venter, a biotechnologist and geneticist who visited Beijing at the end of 2016 to receive the VCANBIO Award for International Cooperation in Life Sciences and Medicine.

Venter, 70, was one of the first to sequence the human genome, and the first to create what is called man-made life: insert a synthetic genome into the cell of a bacterium, whose original genome was destroyed.

Venter and his team put watermarks on the synthetic genome, and one of them was a quote from Irish writer James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to re-create life out of life."

The first man-made cell survived and reproduced.

Now the Chinese version of his book Life at the Speed of Light is available in China.

The book, is based on a speech Venter gave in July 2012 at Trinity College, Dublin.

Venter's speech was titled "What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell", and his lecture was influential because "it confronted the central problems of biology - heredity and how organisms harness energy to maintain order - from a bold new perspective.

With clarity and conciseness he argued that life had to obey the laws of physics and, as a corollary, one could use the laws of physics to make important deductions about the nature of life.