A Video Worth Watching from Time's Man of the Year 2010

Note: Since I posted the NASA Ames video, someone has pulled permission for both embedding and public viewing. But here is the "60 Minutes" interview filmed just after the achievement of creating a strain of mycoplasma mycoides. I'll leave the locked video here for now -- just in case the owners come to their senses.

J. Craig Venter on Synthetic Biology at NASA Ames from Ben Howard on Vimeo.

Craig Venter is Time's Man of the Year for 2010 for his team's "plug and play" creation of the first synthetic cell, Mycoplasma mycoides. This "minimal cell", a parasitic organism which can only live inside other living cells, is meant as a starting point for the creation of microscopic factory-cells.

The aim of the Venter team was.....to build a prototype for a microscopic production line. Back in May, here is what the team had to say in Science:

If the methods described here can be generalised, design, synthesis, assembly and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology … the approach we have developed should be applicable to the synthesis and transplantation of more novel genomes as genome design progresses.

So, if a microorganism could be engineered to include genes that direct the cell to do a number of functions, it would be possible to use this cell for a range of industrial tasks, such as making proteins or carbohydrates or any compounds to order, depending on demand. Theoretically, it might be possible to make biofuels, vaccines, drugs, foodstuffs and anything else genetic engineers can program the new genomes to produce.

What Venter's team really set out to do, and achieved, was show it's possible to build the world's smallest production line, inside the world's smallest factory.

Venter was not so much playing God, but following in the tradition of the great industrial pioneers of last century. He's closer to a latter day Henry Ford - the man who in the 1910s developed the production line that eventually put a car in almost every home in the Western world and became the de novo engineering tool for the mass production of everything from ice cream to tweezers.

What happens next depends on how Venter and others working in this new field can tool up this tiny production line. _Cosmos

"Synthetic Biology" is a far more clever and descriptive term than "metabolic engineering." The word "synthetic" does double duty, since not only are new biological factories to be synthetically generated, but these biological factories are to be used to synthesise valuable chemicals, materials, fuels, and drugs.

We are seeing the preface to the first chapter of a multi-volume work. Much more to come.

Craig Venter Aims to Replace the Entire Petrochemical Industry

“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.” _NYT

NYT

Peak Oil will occur when humans no longer want to bother drilling into the ground to extract dark, gooey, messy liquids to turn into fuels. Instead, humans are slowly but surely developing other, more reliable and sustainable ways to fuel their industrial base and somewhat affluent lifestyles. Dieoff.orgiasts and other members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement hate to see any alternatives to Peak Oil Doom, or any skepticism to the orthodoxy of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. But humans are innately a problem-solving and skeptical lot.

Craig Venter is one example of an unlikely problem solver. He was a poor student in his youth, and only after living through some harrowing experiences in Vietnam as a military medic was young Venter able to get his head on straight, and decide to do something with his life.

...Dr. Venter has a history of defying skeptics, and many people are betting that he will succeed this time as well. Dr. Walton, in fact, invested personally in Synthetic Genomics, and his venture firm, Oxford Bioscience Partners, recently wanted to sink a hefty sum into the company but was turned down when Dr. Venter found other investors offering better terms.

Exxon Mobil is giving Synthetic Genomics $300 million in research financing to design algae that could be used to produce gasoline and diesel fuel. (The new greenhouse will be used for that research.)

BP has invested in the company itself, turning to Synthetic Genomics to study microbes that might help turn coal deposits into cleaner-burning natural gas. Another investor, the Malaysian conglomerate Genting, wants to improve oil output from its palm tree plantations, working toward what its chief executive calls a “gasoline tree.”

...In the approach toward which Dr. Venter is driving, engineers would specify the entire genetic code of a cell — essentially the software that runs the cell — on computers, making design changes as if on a word processor. They would then press the “print” button, so to speak, and the DNA would be manufactured from its chemical components. The synthetic DNA would then be transplanted into an existing cell, where it would “boot up” and take control of the cell’s operations.

...Synthetic Genomics has about 130 employees. But much of its research, including the development of the synthetic cell, is done at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Synthetic Genomics pays for about 25 of the institute’s roughly 300 researchers, and has rights to their results. The rest of the institute’s funding comes mainly from federal grants and its endowment.... _NYT

Venter seems to love challenges and competitions. He lives to defy skeptics and to defeat rivals. And do you know the odd thing? The world is full of young Venters who have not yet -- and may never -- figured out what they want to do with their lives.

Pelted mercilessly with nightmarish predictions of doom and gloom, and instilled by governmenbt schools and indoctrinating universities with the futility of trying to fight their fate, hundreds of thousands of young Venters never amount to much -- when they might have done, given the right experiences in early life.

From an article published at Al Fin Energy