Craig Venter, cartoon villain to some and scientific superhero to others, has the most exciting CV in contemporary research. His 61 years have taken him from Californian bad boy and beach bum, through the trauma of Vietnam war service, to leadership in decoding the human genome and – most recently – making synthetic microbes in his laboratory.

Venter has a soft spot for the FT. He feels we were fair to him during the bitter war of words in the late 1990s, when his company, Celera, was racing against the public sector to decode all human DNA. Making him “Man of the Year 2000” didn’t hurt either.

So, on a short trip to London to launch his lively autobiography A Life Decoded, Venter offered the FT his one available lunch slot. We choose Cecconi’s, a smart Italian restaurant close to Venter’s hotel in Mayfair, to maximise our time together.

Venter arrives at 12.40pm, dropped off by two women, his London book promoter, Annabel Huxley, and Heather Kowalski, who does public relations for Venter’s research institute and is his fiancee. Kowalski normally insists on sitting in on all interviews, but today she has broken her own rule and allowed Venter to lunch alone.

The women leave strict instructions that we must be finished by 2pm when a car will take Venter on to a BBC television interview. That may be difficult, he observes quietly as we begin to read Cecconi’s tempting menu. By the time a waitress comes over to tell us about the day’s specials, it is clear that we are in for a three-course meal.

The 6bn chemical letters of Venter’s personal genome have been decoded and analysed in greater detail than the DNA of anyone else in existence. The analysis shows that Venter carries several genes that increase his risk of developing heart disease and late-onset diabetes. But he has always been an “omnivore”, eating a healthy mixed diet with plenty of fish, and the genetic analysis has made little difference. He orders a pasta starter, followed by grilled halibut. I go for a series of three starters.

“I do enjoy a drink even though there is a history of alcohol abuse in my family,” Venter says. He orders a glass of Pinot Grigio, and I drink a beer.

In his book, Venter intersperses conventional autobiography with commentary about his personal genome. What strikes me about the latter is how little useful personal information it provides. Venter may have a more precise understanding of his own genetic make-up than anyone else on earth, but his only specific response has been to take fat-lowering statin drugs to reduce his susceptibility to heart disease and, possibly, Alzheimer’s disease. And, as he admits to me, “you don’t need to know your genetic code to decide to take statins”. The Venter family’s medical history would have provided sufficient motivation: “My father died at 59, a sudden cardiac death.”

This leads, as we eat our starters, to a discussion of the way scientists and journalists have exaggerated the benefits and impact of new genetic knowledge. He blames his competitors in the public human genome project, who were funded mainly by the US government and Britain’s Wellcome Trust.

“The hype was unbelievable,” he says. “The government guys were hyping the human genome project more and more. If you look back through the documents, you will not see me saying anything about it being the most important research project in the history of humanity or the Apollo project of biology. I said it was only the race to the starting line. I tried to put it all into perspective through analysing my own genome, to show that there is not much you can tell now,” Venter adds. “You cannot read the human genome right now.”

He dismisses the near-term prospects for gene therapy – replacing patients’ defective genes or giving them new genes to help fight a disease such as cancer – and for personalised medicine, in which treatments are precisely matched to genetic make-up. “Gene therapy has almost no chance of working in the near future,” he says. “Personalised medicine has been equally hyped.”

Although he has been described as the alpha male of US science, Venter’s voice and modest body language show no sign of his extremely competitive character. The action is in his steel-grey eyes, which flash with a cold energy as he talks.

Today’s prosperous Venter with neatly trimmed beard and moustache – and wearing an open-necked blue shirt under a well-tailored navy blue suit – is very different from the Venter who first visited London immediately after discharge from the US military. On his arrival at Heathrow airport the scruffy 21-year-old with backpack and sleeping bag suffered half a day of intensive search and interrogation. Immigration officials were apparently convinced that he had come to Britain either to import drugs or to foment opposition to the Vietnam war.

Anyone who talks to Venter and reads A Life Decoded may get the impression that he is not very fond of the UK. As well as that unfortunate first visit, he later faced what he regarded as particularly hostile coverage from the British media. Venter feels that journalists here were unduly influenced by the Wellcome Trust, whose scientists in Cambridge were responsible for one-third of the public human genome project. (Of course, Wellcome researchers believe there was an opposite bias in favour of Venter, the plucky underdog who challenged the research establishment.)

But as the main courses arrive, Venter protests his affection for Britain, “the land of my ancestors”. “I am not a hateful person, I am very forgiving,” he says. “But it was pretty bizarre for governments and charities to be attacking me so openly. I am still baffled by the immaturity of their behaviour.”

One of Venter’s best-known opponents during the 1990s was James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, who had by chance arrived in London at the same time as Venter to promote his own autobiography Avoid Boring People. By the time of our lunch, however, Watson had returned to the US in disgrace after a newspaper quoted him making an apparently racist remark about Africans, for which he later apologised.

When I mention Watson, Venter is quick to condemn his remarks. “Skin colour as a surrogate for race is a social and not a scientific concept,” he says. “There is no basis in the human genetic code for the notion that colour will be predictive of intelligence.” But he adds: “I think Watson disagreed with himself. I don’t think he believes what he was reported as saying.”

It is clear, however, that Venter has not forgiven Watson for turning him into “the poster boy for the commercialisation of research” by talking consistently about the “Venter patents” on newly discovered genes. “In Vietnam, we talked about the ‘gookification’ of the enemy and Watson is a pro at that,” he says. “He knew they were not my patents … They were my discoveries but not my patents. It affects me to this day – people still talk about me commercialising the common heritage of mankind.”

Service in Vietnam, Venter’s “university of death”, was a life-defining experience for him. Working as a hospital corpsman in Da Nang, he saw horrific pain, suffering and death on a daily basis. And he determined to go to a real university after Vietnam, with a view to a career in medical research.

Writing his autobiography – often during long-distance air travel – was particularly cathartic when he got to the Vietnam period, he says: “I became emotional at times. My fellow passengers must have wondered about the crazy guy sitting next to them, with tears streaming down his cheeks.”

By now we are ready for desserts. It is coming up to 2pm but Venter is determined to get an order in, though he settles modestly for a selection of sorbets. We ask the waitress to bring the food as quickly as possible – and fortunately it arrives just before two publicists return to take Venter away. He tells them he wants to eat what is on his plate and finish with a cappuccino. They agree to give us another 15 minutes.

I feel that I should ask Venter about his project that is making headlines at the moment: synthetic biology. The research involves making an artificial chromosome from laboratory chemicals and inserting it into an empty cell, which would then act like a real microbe. Scientists at his J. Craig Venter Institute near Washington DC are “at least a few weeks and probably months away” from doing this.

“The headlines may talk about creating life but in fact we are not really creating life from scratch,” he says. “We are just making the genetic code chemically in the lab - making a copy of an existing chromosome. These are the baby steps, but if they work the possibility of design is there.” Venter is particularly keen on designing new micro-organisms that would be better than their natural counterparts at producing bio-fuels and removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

“I regard the environment as the number one issue facing humanity,” he says. “There is no point in medical researchers coming up with new treatments for cancer if we are not going to be around to use them.”

But Venter’s scientific love remains the human genome rather than genetically engineered microbes. His institute aims to sequence and analyse the genomes of 10,000 people over the next decade. “With that number we could get some serious answers about nature and nurture,” he says. “Scientifically, I’m much more excited about doing 10,000 human genomes and answering basic questions about humanity than I am about synthetic biology.”

Venter has a final controversial point to make with his last sips of coffee – a plea for people to be open about their DNA. “It is an outdated view that genetic studies have to be done secretly and anonymously,” he says. “Secrecy is the main thing that contributes to public fears about genetics. Despite my ups and downs with Jim Watson, I applaud his decision to make his genome public this year.”

Whether his motivation is egotism or altruism, Venter symbolises the all-action scientist who is not afraid to engage with people on controversial issues. As he is swept away to a television studio, I reflect that everyone lamenting the lack of scientific interest and knowledge among the general public – and schoolchildren in particular – should be grateful for his efforts.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

Cecconi’s, 5A Burlington Gardens, London W1
1 x Umbrian sausages
1 x gratinated scallops
1 x artichoke ravioli
1 x gnocchi
1 x grilled halibut
1 x sorbet
1 x special dessert
1 x glass Pinot Grigio
1 x Nastro beer
2 x coffees
Total: £89.80