When not checking the soaring price of share options, he sails his own yacht. Sulston runs a second-hand car, reads The Observer , and is opposed to global capitalism. Their only common denominator is science. However, it would be wrong to underestimate Venter, despite his upstart ways. On his return to the US, he determined to find the answer and studied biochemistry, establishing a reputation as an innovative researcher, albeit one for whom the lure of lucre has been a prime motivation.
Money appears to have little appeal.
The development of new generation DNA analysers in the late Nineties dramatically improved sequencing rates, both for us and for Craig Venter. Similarly, we have come under increasing pressure from scientists to speed up our work. For his part, Venter retains his main ire for British researchers. It was Morgan and Sulston, after all, who flew to the USA in 1998 immediately after Venter had announced his bid to privatise the project. There they pledged that they would double the United Kingdom's investment in unravelling the human genome, a move that restored US government researchers' dented morale, and raised the Sanger centre to the role of being the public project's prime opponent to Celera, much to Venter's annoyance.