Craig Venter, a microbiologist

The scientific career of Craig Venter, who pioneered genomics, big data, and synthetic biology, has been a turning point in biology. His science will continue to influence the world forever. He will be remembered for the first genome of a living organism, for the human genome, and for the first fully synthetic bacterial chromosome. I was fortunate to walk part of an amazing journey with Craig and experience first-hand what visionary science is and what it can lead to for the benefit of humankind. In this article, I make the case that Craig should be remembered also for his revolutionary contribution to microbiology and vaccinology. Indeed, he was the first to sequence a bacterial genome and the first to get a glimpse of the almost infinite diversity of the microbial world, and he pioneered the transition from conventional to modern vaccinology by introducing genomics and synthetic biology.