Craig Venter: DNA's Mapmaker

Who could ever have imagined that a surfer working as a night clerk at Sears, Roebuck & Co. (S ) would eventually become the driving force behind the race to read the genetic code of humanity? That's the unlikely story of J. Craig Venter, a brash biologist who engineered a major leap in scientific knowledge -- and earned millions -- by masterminding efforts to probe the DNA of everything from microbes to man.

Venter might not have broken his surfing habit were it not for the Vietnam War, he says. Faced with the draft, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and ended up as a medical corpsman patching wounds in a hospital in Da Nang. "I got a lifetime of education packed into one year," he recalls.