Going against the grain

'Big ego'

For years, Venter has been famous for his "big ego", although one of his colleagues told The New York Times that, "He's a very insecure person who compensates by coming across as very arrogant and aggressive. ????"

"You need big ego to succeed," says Venter, who has been challenging authority all his life.

"Scientists used to believe that proteins are the carriers of the genetic message ... But the existing beliefs in science, each of them, should be challenged and abandoned. That's what science should be about. It should challenge every aspect of what you've been told, " he says.

If people are successful scientists, that does not mean they are smart about looking forward and coming up with ideas beyond their narrow space, he says.

Venter says such a misunderstanding about proteins and DNA set back science by half a century.

"Just imagine where we would be with the genetic code if we had started in 1900 and tried to understand the genome instead of just thinking that proteins were the genetic material."

For him, the history of science is loaded with belief systems that ultimately get proved wrong.

"So the starting assumption of science should be that it is wrong."

Without challenging or questioning, accepting the existing dogma will kill creativity, so most of the major breakthroughs in science have happened from people changing fields and working in a different place, he says.

Speaking about himself, Venter says: "I was a protein chemist. But I moved to molecular biology and made all these discoveries that the molecular biologists could not make because they believed it was impossible."