Going against the grain

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.