J. Craig Venter Institute

The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) is a non-profit genomics research institute founded by J. Craig Venter, Ph.D. in October 2006. The Institute was the result of consolidating four organizations: the Center for the Advancement of Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation Joint Technology Center. It has facilities in Rockville, Maryland and La Jolla, California.

The Institute studies the societal implications of genomics in addition to genomics itself. The Institute's research involves genomic medicine; environmental genomic analysis; clean energy; synthetic biology; and ethics, law, and economics. The Institute employs over 400 people, including Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith.

The pre-history of JCVI is deeply entwined with the race to sequence the human genome. Craig Venter was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and had started The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a nonprofit private research institute, in 1992 to work on various sequencing projects, including the Human Genome Project (HGP). Among the various accomplishments of TIGR was the first complete genomic sequencing of a free living organism, Haemophilus influenzae, in 1995. This used a shotgun sequencing technique pioneered earlier, but which had never been used for a whole bacterium until TIGR's project.

Venter vocally disagreed with the manner in which the HGP project was being managed, and in 1998, TIGR found itself excluded from the U.S. HGP groups selected for continued funding by NIH. In May 1998, Venter announced that he was quitting the HGP and had joined with investors to start a commercial venture, Celera, which would produce the complete genome sequence in three years – seven years' less time than the HGP timetable. The costs of the sequencing effort would be recovered by marketing the sequences, which would be held in a proprietary database as intellectual property protected by patent. Dozens of other companies including Incyte Pharmaceuticals and Human Genome Sciences also began patenting sequences.

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