Dr. J. Craig Venter presented the 5th Shirley Boyde Memorial Lecture on 15 March 2012 entitled “From Reading to Writing the Genetic Code”.
Dr Venter reviewed the history and development of the shotgun sequencing techniques he and colleagues developed that lead eventually to the sequencing of the Human Genome, published in 2001 in Science. Moving on, he revealed how he and others created the first self-replicating bacterial cell entirely with synthetic DNA.