Craig Venter: A life in pictures

Craig Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 14 October 1946. His school years were unremarkable – he neglected his studies, preferring to spend his time on boats and surfing. According to his autobiography A Life Decoded he got Cs and Ds on his eighth grade report card
Photograph: Penguin

Venter (fourth from left, front row) in the Mills High Varsity swimming team in 1964
Photograph: Penguin

Venter (far left) at counter-insurgency school in 1967. He was against the Vietnam war but was drafted into the US Navy, working in the intensive care ward of a field hospital
Photograph: PR

Venter on China Beach in Vietnam with a sea snake in 1968. After returning home he studied at the University of California, San Diego, graduating in biochemistry and later getting his PhD in physiology and pharmacology
Photograph: Penguin

Fast-forward 32 years and Venter is shaking hands with US President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House on 26 June 2000 at the unveiling of the first draft sequence of the human genome
Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Venter's company Celera Genomics competed with the publicly financed Human Genome Project to complete the draft sequence, but any animosity was forgotten as Francis Collins, head of the HGP at the National Institutes of Health, and Venter met reporters
Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP

Craig Venter and Francis Collins on the cover of Time
Photograph: Gregory Heisler/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Finally combining his passion for genetics and boats - Venter on his research yacht Sorcerer II off the coast of San Diego, California
Photograph: Evan Hurd/Getty Images

Venter relaxing on the 95-foot yacht in Hyannis Harbor, Massachusetts
Photograph: Rick Friedman/Corbis

His autobiography Craig Venter: A Life Decoded was published in 2007
Photograph: PR

Playing god? In the latest chapter of this extraordinary life, Venter and his colleagues describe in the journal Science how they have synthesised the genome of a bacterium from scratch and used it to reprogram a cell, effectively turning one organism into another, manmade organism
Photograph: Ian White/PR