Venter was an abrasive dick, but his general "we can just do things" attitude was transformative in modern genomics. He went against the plodding consensus, and succeeded time after time, first with EST sequencing, then with shotgun sequencing of bacteria and most famously with shotgun sequencing of flies and humans. I will never forget sitting behind Francis Collins and Eric Lander (the chief honshos of the public human genome project) at the CSHL Biology of Genomes meeting in 1998 right when Venter's Celera was announced, and seeing them panicking because they knew he was going to succeed and make them look like fools (which, despite their massaging of the press, he ultimately did).

US biomedical science is way too self-congratulatory. Yes, we've made amazing progress in many areas. But after receiving nearly a TRILLION DOLLARS in federal funds this century, significant progress is a MINIMAL EXPECTATION - not some miraculous gift to society. The field in so many ways overpromises and underdelivers. If we want this kind of public investment for another quarter century, we can't just say "look how much we've done, give us more money!", we have to ask how we can restructure ourselves to optimally - not just marginally - deliver on this investment and trust, and then actually carry though in making the fundamental changes that will accomplish that.