For folks that don’t know, Venter had a company, Celera, they competed with the Human Genome Project (HGP) run by the US Gov’t. They developed interesting techniques to sequence, I believe they are credited with shotgun sequencing.

How were they able to compete?? The HGP published all their work openly, Venter and co used the freely accessible data alongside their own proprietary methods to try and sequence the human genome first themselves.

If I recall correctly it was considered a tie and they both jointly published the first sequenced human genome in Science.