Going against the grain

Motivated and eager

Despite of being one of the leading scientists of the 21st century, Venter almost failed to graduate from high school.

Growing up in California, Venter had bad grades at school.

In high school, Venter's only chance to succeed seemed to be swimming, and he might have competed in the Olympic Games if he was not drafted for the Vietnam War.

In Vietnam, Venter became a corpsman at a Navy hospital due to his high score in an IQ test. One of his tasks was to triage soldiers returning from battle, including the Tet Offensive, to decide who would live and who would die.

The job left him traumatized, and Venter decided to drown himself in the sea.

But as he swam, a shark prodded him and he changed his mind.

The experience in Vietnam influenced him in a lot ways.

For one thing, it convinced him to go back to school. "I decided that I definitely wanted a college education. I enjoyed the work I was doing in medicine so much that I was really interested in practicing it," he says.

Another major influence of the experience in Vietnam is that "it made me unafraid to take risks and try to do things," he says.

Venter would have stayed in the Navy, but he took a risk to go back to school.

Although a terrible student at high school and worried about starting college education from scratch, Venter was very motivated and eager to gain medical knowledge.

He went to college at 22, and in six years, he completed his PhD in physiology and pharmacology.

In 1976, he became a professor at the State University of New York, and in 1984, joined the National Institutes of Health.