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.