by Chip Walter
But now, on the phone, the weariness and sadness in his father’s voice was palpable. It wasn’t a long conversation. They chatted about nothing in particular, and soon Ray hung up. Those were the last words he heard his father speak. A few weeks later, Fredric had his second heart attack. Massive heart failure. He was 58.
Fredric must have known something was up when he made that phone call. That’s the way Ray came to see it. It was his way of saying goodbye. Kurzweil never did get over it. The call planted in him an abiding resentment of dying and death that would fuse his lifelong fascination with artificial intelligence to his belief that even death could be outsmarted.
Even before his father’s illness, as a kid, Kurzweil couldn’t tolerate the loneliness he associated with dying. That was when he first started having the recurring nightmares. In them he would be exploring this endless succession of bare and empty rooms, wandering from one dark and cavernous space to the next, looking to make contact with someone, but finding no one, never getting anywhere. There was this profound, inexplicable anxiety about being…hopelessly abandoned. As a kid he would sometimes wake up sobbing, and the only thing that would help was being held.
In time, Kurzweil came to see the recurring nightmares as perfect descriptions of death. Separation, total and complete. It was unbearable.
This was before all the accolades and prognostications. Before the inventions and patents and medals. And long before he wrote any of his books that laid out the argument that everyone could live forever. That idea hadn’t yet fully formed in his mind.
Not yet. But it would.
9 | VENTER
Around the time Ray Kurzweil was hand-building a computer that would show the world what a genius he was, John Craig Venter was honing his surfing skills at “the Wedge” in Newport Beach, California. That was after he had moved from Millbrae, near San Francisco, where he had spent much of the previous year passing his evenings climbing into his girlfriend’s window late at night for the occasional tête-à-tête. He would scramble along a rope ladder rigged from his second-story bedroom window, silently roll the family car down the street, and disappear into the cool California night. Until, that is, his dad figured out what he was up to, and passed the news on to the girl’s father, who promptly stuck a gun in Venter’s face and told him he’d shoot if he ever caught him again.
If anyone was looking to pinpoint someone who would one day upend the scientific worlds of biology and genomics and become one of the planet’s best known scientists, they might have been forgiven if they overlooked Craig Venter. Among the four children in his family, he was an unrelenting disappointment. His grades were lousy, his teachers didn’t care for his insolent attitude—and even in his senior year at Mills High, he hadn’t given an ounce of thought to college or career. Why worry about it? He was blond and handsome and slim, with a manly command of the surfer lifestyle. A Beach Boy incarnate. And he was a champion swimmer, despite ignoring his coach’s advice for improving his unconventional stroke. The point was: Who needed to bother themselves with the future when there was such a vast and unlimited supply of it?!
Yet three years later, he found himself standing on China Beach in Vietnam, naked as a mole rat, contemplating suicide.
* * *
—
DEATH BY SWIMMING was the plan. Venter had just departed the corrugated, festering Quonset hut where he had been coexisting with his fellow recruits and corpsmen at the Da Nang naval hospital, and walked down to the beach. There he stripped naked and gazed at the South China Sea. Swimming seemed an easy, sensible way to go. The water was right there, and if he was good at one thing, it was swimming. Why not go out doing something he enjoyed, and then, when the exhaustion set in, slip into the black water’s deep embrace?
Venter had been contemplating suicide for a while. Again and again he described the horror of the past several months in long and vivid detail to his girlfriend Kathy back home. He couldn’t take it anymore: the death, the dying, the endless stream of bodies coming in on the choppers from the jungles and bomb-scarred rice paddies, the thatch-and-mud-wattle hamlets scattered in the congealed, jungle heat. He had already watched hundreds of soldiers die, some of them while he held their hearts in his own hands, literally, slithering and shuddering as he struggled to massage them to life.
How appallingly fragile the human body was. And how little could be done as the corpsman gazed upon the young soldiers’ faces when the horrible and inescapable truth hit them: I am dying! These young men, with their legs blown off or their guts hanging half out of their bellies shredded with gunfire, lying sewn up in their beds, waiting for death (or, if they were lucky, a medevac to Japan)—either way, their minds thoroughly ransacked with trauma. The University of Death was how Venter later described it.
Kathy’s response had been a “Dear John” letter. They had to break up. She couldn’t handle the grisly descriptions anymore. So now she was gone too, but there was still the sea. Very good for drowning.
He walked into the surf and began to swim. The riptide was strong—it almost always was—and it carried him quickly beyond the breaking waves into the expanding basin of the sea. He struck out in the general direction of Manila, the Marble Mountains on one side and Monkey Mountain on the other. For a while it would be just him, the barracudas, and the sea snakes: ugly creatures, and deadly, if they got their fangs into you. That would be an unpleasant way to go. Sometimes they swam in schools miles long and up to half a mile wide. He’d rather avoid that. Farther out were the sharks. No venom there. Just jaws and lots and lots of teeth.
Venter had arrived in Vietnam five months earlier on August 25, 1967, diving through the air in a chartered plane like an oversize dart toward the airstrip at Da Nang Harbor. Bright bursts of incoming flack illuminated the dark cabin that held him and the others as the plane bounced to earth. It was a long, long way from surfing the Wedge, winning championship swimming medals in high school, and exploring the ripe joys of teenage sex. A very long way.
Venter had thoroughly screwed the pooch; there was no other way to put it. C’s and D’s throughout high school, except in shop, PE, and swimming. He would purposely bomb tests and quizzes, refuse to answer questions, or sometimes take no tests at all. He didn’t apply to college until after he graduated, and by then it was too late. Somehow, while growing tan and riding the Pacific surf, he had missed the turn of certain political events in the mid-1960s that made it suddenly apparent that an exciting, but possibly very brief, career as an Army infantryman in Vietnam lay in his future.
Soon Venter was drafted, and avoided the Army only by following a piece of advice from his father, an ex-Marine: Enlist in the Navy. It was the best advice his father ever gave him. And it wasn’t a bad deal—at least, it didn’t look that way at the outset. Thanks to his swimming record, the recruiter said he could rotate out of service after three years rather than four, and, in the meantime, serve his country as a member of the Navy swim team. He might even get a chance to compete in the Pan American Games. It never dawned on him that he might end up in Vietnam.
But then, two-thirds of the way through boot camp in San Diego, President Johnson (the very same president who had so graciously stuck his hand out to greet Ray Kurzweil) escalated the war in Vietnam, and said that all armed services sports teams were canceled. Still, surely he wouldn’t be among the unlucky destined to ship out to some place called Da Nang, 7,936 miles from home?
Well, guess what.
Not that Venter was stupid. Maybe he hadn’t been the golden boy his older brother Gary was—he of the soaring grades, academic awards, and sparkling athletics, the brother who was now studying at Berkeley and whom his parents adored beyond measure. Why couldn’t he be more like Gary? That seemed to be the big mystery his whole life: the nagging, never ending question he kept hearing from his mother and father. If that was the situation, why even try to compete? Who could beat perfection? So he had gone the other way, the bombing-tests-sneaking-out-wearing-insolence-
like-a-badge-of-honor way.
* * *
—
AFTER SWIMMING AWHILE, Venter turned and looked back. He was now more than a mile from shore. To one side of him, he saw a school of sea snakes come up for air, their taut necks rising out of the water like so many reptilian prairie dogs. That was disconcerting. He treaded water and looked around. His 22-year-old mind began to wonder. Is this really a good idea? But then, after a moment, the thought passed and he swam on. By now the shore was out of sight, and he was truly alone. That was when he felt it: a shivering, primordial prod from a creature in the sea. A shark! In “bump and bite” mode, testing him.
His first thought was How dare this creature disrupt my plans! He turned and kept swimming, except now his determination was flagging. Here was this sleek, invisible killing machine that could rattle him like a doll once it sank those razor teeth into him before shredding him into disjointed chum. A strike, searing pain, and then, at last, the killing blow. He trod water again. His head swiveled. Where was the damned shore?
Then without warning he was gripped by a new fear so complete and primal that it consumed him whole. What am I thinking?? I don’t want to die! It hit him like a thunderbolt. He had seen so many men die, had seen what a waste that was. How could sending his own life down the toilet help? If he went down, one more dead 20-something American wouldn’t mean a thing to the rest of the world. He had been given this gift: his life. And now it was up to him to do something meaningful with it.
He looked again for the shore, and dug in on pure adrenaline. Now a new fear struck home: the possibility that he might not make it back. How far out had he gone? Was he moving in the right direction? He swam and swam until his arms had turned to taffy. And then, at last, he saw land, and then the edge of the breakers.
But now there was the riptide. It kept pulling him back like a long and beckoning hand. He dug on. Finally, he caught a wave, then a second and a third. He rode each like a lump of flotsam coughed up by the sea, just this sorry bag of soaked cells in the surf, until at last, his feet found the sandy bottom. And there he collapsed on China Beach—utterly drained, but relieved beyond all imagining. In spite of his own impudence, he was alive! In his exhaustion, a kind of purity filled him. An energy, entirely new: a determination to accomplish something worthy.
10 | A LIFE WORTH LIVING
Craig Venter made good on his promise that day on China Beach. In fact, he had made just about as big a stir as any scientist in the world could. But all of that was still more than 25 years down the road. Now, in 1968, after the Navy discharged him, his goals were modest. First, he wanted to get a college education, and then, if he was lucky, a decent-paying job. So he returned to Millbrae and applied to a community college in San Mateo. Because of his lousy high school grades, he didn’t think he could get in anywhere else, and he severely doubted he had the academic chops to succeed in a better school. But a couple of semesters later, he succeeded in transferring to the University of California, San Diego and put his academic career into high gear.
Venter’s original plan had been to become a doctor, the same as Art Levinson. He had already performed more surgeries in his ugly Da Nang Quonset hut as a combat Navy corpsman than some doctors performed after years working in the States. But while studying under Nathan O. Kaplan, a biochemist who had done historic work on cancer, he decided to go into research and up the ante of what constituted a life worth living. A doctor, he figured, assuming he was good, might save a few hundred lives in a lifetime. But a researcher could save the whole world, if he made the right breakthroughs.
And so in 1972, Venter landed a degree in biochemistry, and by 1975 had blown through his Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology. The question now was what to do next. He had the will—but how exactly was he supposed to go about saving the world?
He decided to skip the next step most students undertake in their academic careers: the postdoc. Instead he accepted an offer from the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was a junior faculty position, and a long way from the sunny shores of San Diego, but one takes what opportunities the universe supplies.
At Buffalo, Venter immediately made an impression on his colleagues—but not in a good way. He strode the academic corridors with a ragged beard and a ponytail of long, thinning hair, wearing bell-bottoms embossed with roses and outfits whose colors clashed so luridly they could induce a migraine.
To these quaint behaviors, Venter added his personal brand of unreserved bluntness. He had a habit of telling people precisely what he thought, no punches pulled, but seemed to be utterly clueless as to why anyone had a problem when the punches hit home. On his first day at the university, he was invited to sit in on a student’s defense of her thesis. The student was a favorite of the professor who invited him and he was clearly delighted with his star pupil. But that was lost on Venter, who upon being asked his opinion of the defense commented, “That was the most mediocre load of shit I’ve ever heard.”
Still, Venter was an avid and creative researcher. He continued the work he had begun under Nathan Kaplan in San Diego on how adrenaline affected the cells of the brain and body. If he could just find the gene related to the adrenaline receptor, maybe it would reveal how messages of all kinds were communicated in the brain. And if he could do that, perhaps he would someday fathom why humans behaved the way they did. Even humans like him.
But after several years at Buffalo, Venter grew frustrated. How could he ever truly make a difference? Where was the world-changing science? Then, in 1986, he and his second wife, Claire Fraser, also a scientist, landed appointments at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Neither of them wasted a minute moving to Maryland. Maybe at NIH he could at last find a way to make an impact.
As it turned out, he did.
Word was that a new and breathtaking concept was kicking around the scientific community, one that involved sequencing the entire human genome. Many considered the idea insane, far too ambitious. But there was scuttlebutt that the great James Watson was interested. Watson, together with Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin, had revealed the structure of DNA in 1953. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize; Franklin had died four years earlier and therefore was not included, even though her discovery of the DNA molecule in an x-ray she had taken was crucial to the work.8 Either way, their discovery marked one of the great scientific advancements of all time.
Since then, Watson had grown to become one of those statesman-scientists that often emerge after winning Nobels. He taught at Harvard and ran the legendary Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1965, he literally wrote the book on genetics, Molecular Biology of the Gene, which he followed three years later with one of the best-selling science books ever, The Double Helix.
It had taken 10 years of excruciating labor before Venter had finally nailed down an understanding of one stubborn protein—the adrenaline gene—and he knew as well as anyone that discovering the other hundreds of thousands out there was going to take a very long time. But he didn’t have time for progress that glacial. So if there was a new and quicker way to unlock the meaning behind every human gene, he wanted in.
Venter didn’t know it yet, but that undertaking was about to utterly change his life—and with it, the fundamental science needed to solve aging.
| PART THREE |
RESOURCES
———
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
—PSALMS 23:4
11 | THE HUMAN GENOME
Even before Craig Venter had settled into his job at NIH, the panjandrums of the biological sciences had met at Cold Spring to explore the idea of decoding human DNA. This even though the very concept of a “genome” was alien. At one point, a bioethicist had asked some state legislators in Pennsylvania where their genome was located. A thir
d of them answered that it was in their brain; another third thought maybe it was in their gonads. The remaining legislators didn’t have a clue. In the 1990s, Microsoft Word’s spell-check would routinely autocorrect “genome” to “gnome,” as if the fabric of human life were some ugly, knob-faced troll. Even Herb Boyer, at Genentech, thought there was no way the genome would ever be sequenced. It was too complicated and would take forever.
And truthfully, in 1986, it was blindingly difficult to read DNA proteins—invisible, biological molecules of exquisite complexity and design. Scientists had known for decades that DNA spelled out all of the information needed for the growth and operation of a human being. It was, in effect, a molecular software program that used four chemicals in different combinations to describe how to grow bodies and brains from a single fertilized egg, and then turn them into fully functioning humans. All over the world people rose and went off to their jobs, bounced their babies, watched life go on in all of its variety and complexity, and rarely gave a single thought to the strange and ancient substance that made it all possible. Nor did they know that the vast majority of human DNA had hardly changed for a good two billion years, although there had obviously been a few crucial amendments.
The four chemicals in any genome—adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T)—were attached to one another in the shape of a ladder, which twisted into a spiral so tight that it fit within each of the body’s 100 trillion cells. The whole spiral is a mere 79 billionths of an inch wide, invisible to the naked eye. The sequence of the paired rungs forms chunks of information called genes; the order of those genes describes how they create all the cells a body needs to operate, as well as all the ongoing work each requires to stay alive from one day to the next.
