Craig Venter
cevans | June 3, 2010
What do these three quotations have in common? Hint: it lives in a petri dish.
"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life." -- James Joyce
"What I cannot build, I cannot understand." -- Richard Feynman
"See things not as they are, but as they might be." -- from American Prometheus, a biography of the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer
Although James Joyce could never have imagined it, his words -- and those of Feynman and Oppenheimer, too -- are no longer relegated to library stacks, but instead live on inside an unlikely host: the world's first synthetic…
cagapakis | May 26, 2010There is an interesting and very thoughtful piece by Craig Venter and Daniel Gibson in today's Wall Street Journal going through what their breakthrough is and what it isn't, where they see the project going in the future, and why public discussion is important:
[Previous genetic engineers] did not create life in a test tube, nor did we create life from scratch. We transformed existing life into new life. We also did not design and build a new chromosome from nothing. Rather, using only digitized information, we synthesized a modified version of the naturally occurring Mycoplasma mycoides…
cagapakis | May 21, 2010The reaction to the Venter Institute's synthetic genome transplantation has been decidedly mixed. Is this the beginning of something new and wonderful, the ability to really design organisms from scratch? Is it something more sinister, the beginning of a dark era where techno-corporate (or terrorist) interests can design something that will destroy the environment in catastrophic ways? Is it just a technical advance or a conceptual breakthrough? A philosophical revolution? Is it a Big Deal or big whoop? Synthetic biology has never been just one thing and still has many different goals, with a…
cagapakis | May 20, 2010This is a pretty old video we made about Craig Venter that I've shared before on Hydrocalypse, but I think now is a good time to share it again. When Craig isn't creating synthetic bacteria, he's sailing the world, searching the oceans for interesting DNA sequences. We were inspired by this lifestyle (and sometimes even his science too) and SNL, and from that came Venter's on a Boat, by Hydrocalypse Industries (warning: the song contains a lot of bad language):
cagapakis | April 17, 2010New in vitro fertilization technology is making it possible for someone to have two moms--one that provides the genome in the nucleus of the cell, and one that provides the rest of the egg cell, including the mitochondria. Since all mitochondria are passed down from the mother in the egg (sperm are just too small to provide anything but the father's genetic material to the fertilized embryo), transplanting the nucleus from a fertilized embryo to an egg from a different woman can bypass the transmission of any mitochondrial diseases that the mother carries. Because mitochondria have their own…
amillikan | January 19, 2009In this week's Science Saturday, science writers Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer look ahead at the scientific controversies and discoveries of the coming year. Will Craig Venter finally produce artificial life in 2009? Will NASA find proof of Martian life? Will the public become even less informed about science? And perhaps most importantly, will Obama's science policy improve on Bush's?