Three years later Venter jumped at the chance for the big job, sequencing the entire human genome, at the biotech Celera.

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Sample job: Intern, Molecular Based Sequencing Assay, Brown Deer, Wisc.

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The central struggle was between the publicly funded international Human Genome Project, led by Francis Collins, a distinguished scientist and devout Christian, which pursued a slow-and-steady approach to sequencing until Celera, a private company led by Craig Venter, appeared on the scene and boldly claimed that its revolutionary new technique, whole-genome shot-gun sequencing, could do the job in less than half the time.

ECONOMIST: Medical research

Some say that doctors need to do a better job of identifying the key driver mutations inside common tumors, using newfangled gene sequencing machines and other exotic technologies.

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