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 understanding why diseases arise, why some people are more vulnerable than others, and how medicine might one day intervene at the level of the gene itself. The Human Genome Project (HGP), launched in 1990 as a collaboration between the US, UK and several other countries, had been built on the assumption that this would be a slow, methodical, publicly funded endeavour - a decade-long effort whose results would belong to everyone. Venter upended those assumptions with a single act of competitive timing. In the late 1990s, with the $3 billion HGP already years into its work, he concluded that he could enter the contest late and still outrun it. The bet very nearly paid off. By 2000, his company Celera and the HGP were forced into a jointly declared draw, announced at the White House with President Bill Clinton in attendance. The New York Times reported that Venter agreed to the arrangement reluctantly, convinced he could have taken the prize outright. The instrument of that challenge was whole-genome shotgun sequencing - a technique that discarded the painstaking preliminary mapping the government project relied on, instead sequencing fragments simultaneously and using computational power to reconstruct the result. The NYT noted that the NIH had previously rejected Venter's grant application on the grounds that the method could not work. His vindication was total, if officially inconclusive. His earlier breakthrough had been equally significant. In 1995, Venter published the decoded sequence of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae - the first time a complete bacterial genome had been read and annotated. According to the NYT, the moment electrified biology: for the first time, researchers could examine the full genetic inventory of a living organism, triggering a rush to decode the genomes of known pathogens. His ambitions extended beyond the genome race. He and his teams created the first self-replicating bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesised genome in 2010 - proof, according to the JCVI, that genomes could be designed digitally, built from chemical components, and booted up to run a living cell. The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition, in which Venter used his own yacht to circumnavigate the globe between 2005 and 2006, deployed metagenomics to reveal extraordinary microbial diversity and reported the discovery of millions of new genes. In later years, he co-founded Human Longevity, combining genomics with ageing research, and most recently Diploid Genomics, focused on using patients' genomes for diagnosis....