When the human genome project needed to drum up excitement, back in the 1980s, Wally Gilbert, the Harvard molecular biologist, pitched it as “the ultimate answer to the commandment ‘Know Thyself’ ”. In this book, J Craig Venter, the genomics pioneer and scientific entrepreneur, takes him literally. Venter, whose private company, Celera, shared the glory of sequencing the human genome with a consortium of government-backed scientists from America and Britain, has used the enormous genome-sequencing power at his disposal to produce a computer file that contains all six billion of the DNA characters he inherited from his mother and father 61 years ago.

Other men have, like Venter, sat down to write their life stories with the benefit of their collected papers, fat files of press clippings, logs of their various yachts, military records, and so on. Nobody has ever done so with his entire genome to hand and, thus, the ability to apply everything known about human genetics to his own unique complement of genes. So this book marks the beginning of something new. It is the first molecular biography.

This is no mere gimmick, nor is Venter’s a story that needs gimmickry to boost its appeal. A Californian surf-bum dropout with a penchant for making and sailing things goes to Vietnam with the US medical corps, learns a great deal about life and death, returns with new academic fire in his belly, blazes through university to a career researching the way that cells react to adrenaline. In the 1990s, the scope of his ambition and his abilities as a salesman of ideas and as a team leader twice take him into new relationships with the private sector, first with an institute tied to a biotech company that discovered genes at an unprecedented rate, then with Celera. Twice he earns the obloquy of his scientific peers for seeming to sell the birthright of humanity to unscrupulous businessmen. Twice his insistence on trying to maintain academic respectability throws him into conflict with the business partners his peers have condemned. Twice he sails away with truly impressive scientific achievements, not to mention a larger yacht than he had when going in – yachts that he takes to victory in gruelling races.

Venter’s account of all this is never less than engaging, if not as satisfying as the journalist James Shreeve’s The Genome War, which covers much of the same ground. Venter himself comes over fairly clearly, though perhaps his egomania is less obvious to him than to the reader. No other characters in his book – not his parents, or his two ex-wives – come to life at all. His successful team-building suggests that he is good with people in some ways, but he either can’t explain them, or chooses not to. As a result, he stands alone, recalling as his life’s peak experience a moonlit night sailing single-handed, high on amphetamines, through mountainous seas off Bermuda to the sound of Roy Orbison, with his crew locked below decks after something between a falling-out and a mutiny. It comes as no surprise that the two people he cites repeatedly as profound influences are not long-term friends but young men he met as patients in Vietnam, both of whom died within days: “The man who should have lived did not, while the man who was supposed to die immediately lived beyond all conceivable odds because he wanted to. . . They helped turn me from a young man without purpose into one compelled to understand the very essence of life. And life was so cheap in Vietnam that my mission had real urgency.”

These experiences, and the way he chooses to recount them, offer far more insight into Venter than his expensively elaborated genome – complete with its evidence of his predisposition to asthma and Alzheimers, evidence which is discussed in little text boxes scattered through the book. The nascent genre of molecular biography suffers from the obvious problem that nobody yet knows how to read genomes with any real acuity. Scientists know some of the things that some individual genes can mean under some circumstances. They are a long way from understanding all the factors involved. As Venter points out, realistic disease prognostication is still in most cases unachievable. Subtle psychological insight is not on the table. Witness Venter’s filling out a box about “the androgen hormones” and the Y chromosome with a tale of teenage trysting thwarted when his father tipped off his girlfriend’s gun-toting dad: “I never fully got over what I viewed as my father’s betrayal, which I considered even worse than having a gun pointed at me. I can blame it all on the Y.” And important things come across as bathetic - a box on the genetic detail that predisposes him to Alzheimer's is titled “Ouch!”

The genome-reading problem is scientific, though, and will, in time, be overcome. Genes will never say everything about a life, but they will say a lot. It will cost as much to lay down a full genome analysis for a child born 10 years hence as it will to lay down a case of port. And like the port, the analysis will improve with time, as more is learnt about the meaning of the subtleties encoded in our genes, and about how the pitfalls that appear there can be avoided with foresight.

These birthday genomes will mostly be read for possibilities; only rarely will a genetic destiny be fixed beyond avoidance. But retrospective readings will also be possible. It will be odd if the next 50 years do not bring molecular biographies of figures such as Stalin, Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher (and a revised edition of this book, tricked out with more revealing detail, might be expected a fair bit sooner). Odd, too, if a well-resolved genomic dimension does not add something to all these stories.

So much for the genome-reading problem, what about the writing? Nobody yet has the language for combining genetic aperçus with more familiar representations of character and narrative. In A Life Decoded we might sense that Venter’s apparent genetic predisposition to attention-deficit disorder explains something about him – but we are hard put to say, within the context of a biography, quite what function such an explanation has. It doesn’t change who he was, or even how he was. Maybe it says something about what he could have been or couldn’t be, but how that might make him or us feel is not yet clear.

There is poetry in seeing Venter’s genome through the story of the life that made genome-reading possible and sensing that his genes, these subjects within the story, were also, in some way, its shapers. But the poetry depends on the reader’s imagination – it is largely absent from the text. I doubt any writer could as yet do justice to such a view of himself, let alone one whose interest is primarily in getting his side of a fascinating set of events down for posterity.

That said, at one point Venter does manage to convey something of the excitement we might experience when the stories of molecules and men are mixed more thoroughly. It comes when he describes his first experiments on the effects of adrenaline on cells grown in the lab: “I gradually moved the [adrenaline-coated] beads to kiss the heart cells, which immediately jumped to a new pace. In elation, and due to the same mechanism, my own heart jumped, too.” The molecular life can be a moving one.

Swimming for his life

During my time in Vietnam, writes Craig Venter, I witnessed several hundred soldiers die, more often than not while I was massaging their hearts. After five months, I decided to – literally – swim away from the horror. My plan was to carry on swimming until I was exhausted and then sink. More than a mile out, as I saw venomous sea snakes, I had doubts. But I still swam on – until a shark began prodding me in a ‘bump and bite’ attack. For a moment I was angry that the shark had disrupted my plan. Then I became consumed with fear. What the f*** was I doing? I wanted to live, more than I had ever done in the previous 21 years of my life. I turned and swam for the shore in a panic. I was afraid, not of the shark or snakes but that I might not make it back because of my stupidity in wanting to die. On shore at last, I lay there for what felt like hours. No doubt in my mind that I wanted to live. I wanted my life to mean something; I wanted to make a difference.

A LIFE DECODED by J Craig Venter
Allen Lane £25 pp400

Read on... websites: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2010049.ece
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