Last week it was reported that the J Craig Venter Institute created the first synthetic organism. I read that this came at “considerable cost” of about $40 million. Knowing that this Institute was a non-profit, I wondered whether this cost was born by private donations or by the American taxpayers. To my disappointment, the Venter Institute has been the recipient of 55 NIH grants or contracts, totaling tens of millions of dollars (actually, very close to $40 million).

This is interesting if you know the history of Venter’s stormy relationship with the scientific community. He was the founder of Celera, the private, for-profit company that sequenced the human genome. Celera was bankrolled (I believe) by a company that was making DNA sequencing machines, Perkin Elmer. (I can’t find any NIH grants to either Celera or Perkin Elmer, although I know that Perkin Elmer sold sequencing machines to the public genome project.) Since the government hates competition, and academics hate successful capitalists, Venter was bad-mouthed by the establishment. So he formed a non-profit (The Institute for Genomic Research), which has received over 100 grants or contracts from the NIH, and, so, is “good.” These two non-profits are probably more profitable for Venter than Celera was — after all, it’s bankrolled by DC.

The Best of Kathryn Muratore