“I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry,” Craig Venter said in one interview. “We have learned nothing from the genome,” he said in another, a decade after winning the race to read it. The two statements sound contradictory. They aren’t. The geneticist who built the smallest self-replicating cell, wanted to do everything biology had not yet done, and he was scornful of how little had actually been understood in the process. He held both views at once, without trouble.

Towering, sharp, impatient with anyone who wasn’t already moving, the first time I met him, that was the register I remember. He was easier to admire from a distance, but his critics underestimated how often he turned out to be right. He died on April 29 in San Diego, aged 79, of complications from a recently diagnosed cancer. The........

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