Ladies and Gentlemen,

We come together on this Veterans Day saddened by the recent terrorist attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. Our hearts and prayers are with the families of our fallen servicemen and women. Once again we are reminded of the importance of service to our country and of the price that those who serve sometimes pay.

In my family there has been a long history of military service in times of war. My parents both served on different shores of the Pacific as part of the Marine Corps during World War II and they in fact met at Camp Pendelton in California. My grandfather was a private in World War I serving in France. One month before Armistice he was seriously wounded and left for dead and had to crawl miles across enemy lines to safety.

My great-grand father was a sharp shooter in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. My great-great-great-grandfather served in the Calvary during the War of 1812 and two generations earlier an ancestor was a fifer and medic during the Revolutionary War. I was drafted off my surfboard in 1965 and ended up in the Navy Medical Corps. During my medical training at Balboa Hospital in San Diego I was trained to diagnose and treat tropical diseases such as malaria as well as in emergency medicine.

Even though I thought the war in Vietnam was wrong and have openly expressed that view, my family history and the tradition of serving our country played heavily on my mind. In 1967, I wrote a letter to the Navy Surgeon General and volunteered to go to Vietnam where I argued that my medical training could make a difference in men's lives. A short while later I received orders to the Navy Hospital in Danang.

During my first six months there I helped run the intensive care ward and worked in the receiving/triage unit including during the Tet offensive. For the second six months I worked primarily on tropical and infectious diseases. I was with many of the men whose names are on this wall when they died. Some died as a result of trauma, some of disease. The capacity of medicine while great was nowhere near great enough. I witnessed fellow soldiers lose their lives from seemingly insignificant wounds and saw others whose bodies were ravaged by injuries, yet somehow managed to live, in some cases out of shear determination. These events showed me the power of the human spirit.

These life-altering experiences peaked my interest in learning how the cells in our bodies work and interact, and thus how life is created and sustained. I also learned that I could no longer afford to waste one precious moment of life. I came back from the war with a burning sense of urgency to get an education and to somehow change the world. Due to my previous lackluster academic record, I started at a community college in California on the GI bill. Six years later I received a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

As many of you may know from the media, after 16 years doing basic science research at a medical school and at the National Institutes of Health, I left the government to form a new not-for-profit research institute, The Institute for Genomic Research. In 1995 my research team decoded the first genetic code of a free-living organism. Over the past five years we have gone on to read the genetic code of many key infectious disease organisms, including malaria, which I treated as a young corpsman in Vietnam. My father was one of thousands who suffered from malaria in World War II and in Vietnam 1.2 million days were lost to service with several hundred deaths due to malaria.

Wanting to move even faster to address human disease through research, two years ago I co-founded and became the president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics, the company that has been responsible for decoding the genomes of the fruit fly, the mouse and most notably the human genome. Along with members of the publicly funded sequencing effort, I stood before the world on June 26th at the White House to announce the first assembly of the human genetic code. I couldn't help but think while I was at the White House podium that I owed my success and motivation, in some part to the men and women who served in the Vietnam War, and even more, to the ones who paid with their lives. That incredible experience transformed me from a young man without direction and purpose into a man driven to understand the very essence of life and to use that understanding to change medicine.

I am constantly reminded of the war through the frequent emails and letters I receive from those who served with me-some are fellow scientists, others business leaders, politicians, physicians, farmers and teachers. I am struck by their life stories and the impressive contributions they have made to society. Our common bond is that we have all been fundamentally changed by the war, and that change has been positive in countless ways. One change I have seen is that our government is no longer so willing to get involved in conflicts without a clear objective. It also has not escaped my attention that more lives can be saved with the stroke of a pen than from any medical treatment.

So I stand before you today as a very thankful man. I knew when I landed in the US in August 1968 after that long flight back from Vietnam that I was given a gift-my life. And I vowed that I would somehow find a way to make my life meaningful, to repay and to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives. I feel an obligation to make them proud and to let the world know that those who served their country in Vietnam have made a difference in the world. Thank you.

-J. Craig Venter, Ph.D.

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Biography
J. Craig Venter, Ph.D.

J. Craig Venter, Ph.D. is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of Celera Genomics Corporation and the Founder, Chairman of the Board and former President of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a not-for-profit genomics research institution.

Between 1984 and the formation of TIGR in 1992, Dr. Venter was a Section Chief, and a Lab Chief, in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 1990, he developed expressed sequence tags (ESTs), a new strategy for gene discovery that has revolutionized the biological sciences. Over 72% of all accessions in the public database GenBank are ESTs from a wide range of species including human, plants and microbes. Using the EST method Dr. Venter and the scientists at TIGR have discovered and published over one half of all human genes. Out of new algorithms developed to deal with 100,000's of sequences TIGR developed the whole genome shotgun method that led to TIGR completing the first 3 genomes in history and a total of 11 to date.

In May of 1998, Dr. Venter and Perkin-Elmer announced the formation of Celera Genomics. Celera's goal is to become the definitive source of genomic and medical information thereby facilitating a new generation of advances in molecular medicine. Celera is building the expertise and information that will enable scientists to transform the way in which human and health problems are diagnosed and treated. On June 26, 2000, Celera announced that it had completed the first assembly of the human genome, which has revealed a total of 3.12 billion base pairs in the human genome. Celera now begins the analysis and annotation phase.

Dr. Venter has published more than 160 research articles and is one of the most cited scientists in biology and medicine. He has received numerous awards, including the King Faisal Award in Science (2000), Beckman Award (1999), the Chiron Corporation Biotechnology Research Award (1999), and the R&D Magazine Scientist of the Year (1998). In addition to receiving honorary degrees for his pioneering work, he has been elected a Fellow of several societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology. He received his Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Venter served in the U. S. Navy Medical Corps from 1965-1968, spending the final year of his service in Danang, Vietnam.