The world lost a consequential futurist today: Craig Venter.

When the Human Genome Project — a $3 billion, government-backed consortium of the world's most prestigious institutions — was moving too slowly for his liking, he decided he would simply race it to the finish. And nearly won outright. What he lacked in institutional blessing he made up for in wisdom and grit: the ability to see what everyone else assumed was impossible and build a team brilliant enough to prove them wrong.

I devoted a full chapter of my book on the future of AI and biology, The Genesis Machine, to Craig and his work. Because I believed then, as I believe now, that you can't understand where biology is headed without reckoning with where it came from, he was in many ways the pivot point. His whole-genome shotgun method. The sequencing of Haemophilus influenzae. Celera. The audacious, complicated, deeply human race to decode our own species.

One of my favorite Craig stories: In 2010, his team encoded a line from James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life) directly into the synthetic genome of the first self-replicating bacterial cell ever created. The Joyce estate, being prolifically litigious, wanted to sue, but basically had to send a cease-and-desist letter to... a bacteria. Which is, honestly, the most Craig Venter thing that could have happened.

Craig was not a saint. He was not easy. His ego was famous and documented, including by himself. But all that meant that he was right when it counted, and he kept moving when the establishment said stop.

I was in genuine awe of everything he accomplished. Not the awards or the wealth or the White House ceremonies — though those came — but the underlying act of will it took to believe that one team, armed with a faster method and a big enough computer, could outpace a decade-long global effort and rewrite what we know about what it means to be human. His original sequencing methods may now be obsolete, replaced by technologies that wouldn't exist without him... but that's the correct fate for a pioneer. May his memory be a blessing.