Barbara Rae-Venter

Barbara Rae was born on July 17, 1948, in Auckland, New Zealand, and raised in Auckland's Remuera neighborhood. She moved to the United States at age 20, and has United States citizenship. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and biochemistry from the University of California at San Diego in 1972, and received her Ph.D. in biology at the same institution in 1976. From 1976 to 1979 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center (then known as the Roswell Park Memorial Institute) in Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1983 she was assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Rae-Venter focused her research career on breast and gastrointestinal cancer.

She matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin Law School in May 1983 and received her J.D. in August 1985. She later worked as a patent lawyer in California specializing in biotechnology and was an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1988 to 1990.

The field of genetic genealogy was developed largely by volunteer family history hobbyists, and Rae-Venter realized that the techniques used to identify family members in adoption cases could have wider uses in law enforcement and the identification of suspects and victims of crime. Some law enforcement agencies were initially dismissive of the idea.

Rae-Venter's interest in genealogy began when she found a relative through a website for sharing family trees who was looking to identify his biological father. In order to help her relative search for his father, she completed an online course on how to use genetic testing to find relatives, eventually becoming one of the course's teachers.

Rae-Venter has been involved in solving several high-profile criminal cases, including the Bear Brook murders in New Hampshire and the Golden State Killer in California. In 2018, after her role in using genetics and genealogy to solve crimes became well-known, Rae-Venter was named in Nature's list of "10 People who Mattered this Year". She was recognized in the 2019 Time 100 list of most influential people.

Rae-Venter's initial involvement with using publicly-available genetic databases and family trees to contribute to criminal investigations started in 2015, when she was asked to assist investigators in identifying the true identity of a woman who had been kidnapped as an infant. In addition to searching for family members whose DNA matched the woman's genetic profile on publicly available websites, Rae-Venter suggested the woman submit her sample to closed databases in the hopes of finding more family members. The case evolved to require 20,000 hours of work and a significant number of volunteers who were able to identify the woman's birth name and to put her in contact with one of her grandfathers.

In addition to identifying the woman's family and birth name, Rae-Venter and her team identified the birth mother of a relative found during the search, which allowed them to meet. The identification of this woman led authorities to link her kidnapper to a series of murders in New Hampshire, known as the Bear Brook murders. Rae-Venter contributed to the eventual identification of the suspect's true identity, Terry Peder Rasmussen, using DNA obtained from his autopsy after his death in prison. Rasmussen had been imprisoned for another murder under the name Larry Vanner. …

In the late 1960s, while in Sydney, Australia, Rae-Venter met J. Craig Venter, a US Navy sailor on leave from the Vietnam War. They reunited while she was on a three-month hiking tour of Europe, and they were married in Geneva in 1968. They separated in 1980, and have one child. She married Joseph Elmer Huff III on September 21, 1981, divorcing in April 1983. Later in her career, Rae-Venter became involved in the Human Genome Project, sequencing the first copy of the human genome. In the course of her research into her own family tree, Rae-Venter identified a great uncle who worked as a police officer in London during the time Jack the Ripper was active.