J. Craig Venter

For pillaging the microbial biodiversity of the world’s oceans. For more than a year, Venter sailed the high seas in his pirate ship, taking samples every 200 miles and sending the booty home to the US for genetic sequencing. “The Sorcerer II” met a few cog ships along the way – resistance in Ecuador and French Polynesia – but, in 2005, Venter returned from his voyage virtually unscathed and formed a new company, Synthetic Genomics, which aims to create an artificial life form from scratch.