People to Watch in 2000

Who will make big news in the business world this year? Who will emerge from relative obscurity to become a major player? To start the new year, Times business reporters selected people from their beats who they believe will be among those to watch in 2000--in Southern California, across the country and around the world. Some are well known, having made big news in previous years. Others are not exactly household names but nevertheless are likely to make a major impact in their fields.

Of course, there’s no way to predict just what’s going to happen in the next 12 months. Nor can any such list be complete--there’s always the come-from-nowhere phenom who’ll surprise everyone. But it’s a good bet that if you follow the fortunes of these 22, you’ll see the top business stories of 2000 unfold.

J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics

Few scientists have stirred up as much controversy and excitement in the world of biotechnology as J. Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics. This year, Celera will be charging ahead with efforts to decode the human genome--the detailed set of genetic instructions for the human animal.

A former Californian--he got his doctorate at UC San Diego--Venter, now 53, polished his scientific credentials at the National Institutes of Health and a nonprofit institute he founded.

He earned the ire of his fellow scientists, however, by boasting that his young company, a subsidiary of PE Corp. in Rockville, Md., would beat the federally funded Human Genome Project in a race to spell out all 3 billion “letters”--chemical building blocks--in human DNA. The information should be invaluable in finding new ways to treat cancer and heart disease.

Venter’s efforts have been a spur to the public project, which now expects to finish “a working draft” of the genome before summer. Venter predicts that Celera will have its rough-cut version done before then.

“Anyone who has cancer or has a chronic disease is thinking that Celera is not going fast enough,” Venter said. “Going slow doesn’t help anybody except those who want to make a career out of sequencing the genome.”