Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World’s Energy Crisis
By Thomas Goetz
May 18, 2012
There is one version of Craig Venters life story where he wouldve been a dutiful scientist at the National Institutes of Health, a respected yet anonymous researcher in genetics, perhaps. Thankfully, Venter saw that story line developingand set about making sure it never happened.
Instead, in 1992 Venter left the NIH to head the nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research. Six years later he founded Celera Genomics, a brash rival to the NIH project that aimed to sequence the full code of the human genome. Venter had come up with a better techniqueknown as shotgun sequencingto get the job done, and it changed the way we translate genetics from proteins into code. Not incidentally, it also served as a model for todays Big Data explosion in science and research. In 2001 Celera officially tied the NIH to the genome finish line, though the companys sequence was more than a bit further along. (Celeras model genome, it just so happened, included Venters own DNA.)
In the decade since, Venter has been on a tear of invention and exploration. In 2004 he sailed around the world, discovering thousands of new species and sequencing millions of new genes. In 2007 he unveiled his own genome, unexpurgated (it revealed a predisposition for risk-taking, among other things). And in 2010 he announced the first successful synthesis of lifea unique critter borne from two distinct organisms, thus proving for the first time that it is indeed possible to create new organisms for specific purposes and functions. He is, in every respect, the epitome of an icona figure who has pushed science forward, sometimes by sheer force of will.
I spoke recently with Venter in San Francisco, at an event hosted by City Arts & Lectures and the California Academy of Sciences. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/mf_venter/
exboyfil
(17,862 posts)He just may do it. To be young again. I definitely would major in Computational Biology. I could not get the kids interested in it though. My friend's son just got his B.S. and is moving on to PhD. It is an exciting time (akin to the space race but with so much more at stake).
longship
(40,416 posts)A hearty R&K.
VocalProgressive
(5 posts)Guy's just another corporate hyena who wants to make Megabucks, ethics be damned. There really is no justification for patenting naturally occurring genes or pathways and as a result almost crushing international, basic genomics research.