The God of Small Things

Back when Craig Venter was the bad boy of science, racing the U.S. government to sequence the human genome—and using some of his own DNA to do it—he kept his face clean-shaven, and often posed for photographs in suits or medical coats. With his high forehead, bald scalp, and laborato­ry pallor, he looked more like central casting’s idea of a respectable scientist than the self-promoting egomaniac that his enemies labeled him, or the surf bum and Vietnam medic that, as journalists never failed to point out, he had been as a younger man.

These days Venter has the air of a richer, less-rumpled Steve Zissou, the Jacques Cousteau–like oceanographer played by Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic . He sports a wraparound white beard and has the persistent tan of someone who’s spent much of the past few years ...