New Delhi, May 1 -- J Craig Venter, the geneticist and entrepreneur whose competitive instincts helped reshape modern biology, died on Wednesday in San Diego at the age of 79. The J Craig Venter Institute, the nonprofit research body he founded, said in a statement he had been briefly hospitalised after unexpected side effects arising from treatment for recently diagnosed cancer. The decoding of the human genome - the complete sequence of roughly three billion chemical base pairs that constitute the genetic blueprint of our species - was among the most consequential scientific undertakings of the 20th century. The premise for the pursuit was straightforward: read the full instruction manual of human biology, and it opens a path to understan...