He wasn't from the human genome project. He (in)famously led a competing <i>company</i> (Celera Genomics) that was trying to use shotgun sequencing to do the same thing as the official project, but "faster".<p>It was a fairly big controversy at the time, because it wasn't clear you could do shotgun assembly of a genome the size of the human genome without the scaffolding that the official project put in place, and also...the company was trying to get the genome "first" so that it could file patents. It all seems a little quaint now, given how little immediately actionable information came out of the genome effort, but it was the OpenAI vs Anthropic of the late 90s.<p>Also, for what it's worth, my recollection is that the Venter genome is actually...Craig Venter's genome.