Family and Education
Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. In his youth, he did not take his education seriously, preferring to spend his time on the water in boats or surfing. According to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said to never be a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds on his eighth-grade report cards.
Although he was against the Vietnam War, Venter was drafted and enlisted in the United States Navy where he worked in the intensive-care ward of a field hospital. While in Vietnam, he attempted to commit suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind more than a mile out. Being confronted with wounded, maimed, and dying soldiers on a daily basis instilled in him a desire to study medicine — although he later switched to biomedical research.
Venter graduated from Mills High School and began his college career at a community college, College of San Mateo in California. He received his B.S. degree in biochemistry in 1972, and his Ph.D. degree in physiology and pharmacology in 1975, both from the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, he studied under biochemist Nathan O. Kaplan. and married former Ph.D. candidate Barbara Rae. After working as an associate professor, and later as full professor, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health in 1984.
In Buffalo, he divorced Dr. Rae-Venter and married his student, Claire M. Fraser, remaining married to her until 2005. In late 2008 he married Heather Kowalski. They live in La Jolla in San Diego, California where Venter gut-renovated a $6 million home.
Venter himself recognized his own ADHD behavior in his adolescence, and later found ADHD-linked genes in his own DNA.
Read more about this topic: Craig Venter
Famous quotes containing the words family and, family and/or education:
“Welcome to the great American two-career family and pass the aspirin please.”
—Anastasia Toufexis (20th century)
“True spoiling is nothing to do with what a child owns or with amount of attention he gets. he can have the major part of your income, living space and attention and not be spoiled, or he can have very little and be spoiled. It is not what he gets that is at issue. It is how and why he gets it. Spoiling is to do with the family balance of power.”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)
“What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)