Venter is a vietnam veteran. He has seen death. Now a geneticist he used a computer, some common microbes, a DNA synthesizer and 4 bottles of chemicals. fThe geneticists motives are hard to grasp. Whilst raising huge philosophical questions he stands to make vast wealth. Hehas already secured aq deal with Exxon mobil to create algae that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it in o fuel. His dreams of creating organisms for industry to do exact what we want is no longer a dream. Hs team began with a computer reconstruction of the genome of a common bacteria. This information was fed in to a DNA synthesizer that produced short strands of the bugs DNA. These strands were stitched together by first feeding them nto yeast theninto E coli bacteria. The bugs natural repair mechanisms saw the broken strands and repaired them. After a while, the team had all 1 million letters of the bacterias genome. To mark the genome as synthetic they spliced innocuous DNA including a line from James Joyce, 'To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.' The synthetic genome was transferred in to another common bug, as this bug multiplied, some of it's progeny diched thier own DNA and began using the synthetic genome. Tus transformation began.
This is a quasi religious moment. It could transpire we ceated ourselves. Ethicists are split. Described as a ' Pandoras box' moment, much more significant than the splitting of the atom. The possibilities, as Venter says, are limited by our imaginations. I would add our nature and motives. Though the potentials for destruction are clear, like with the simplest tool such as a hammer we will have our Thomas Chippendales and our Peter Sutcliffes, and that is just a pocket of west yorkshire.
We are in a mess ecologically. Our only way out is to use our heads. This science could save or destroy us yet it seems survival usually wins out. Exciting times.
Actually Venter is a greedo. He tried to privatise the sequencing of the human genome and would probably have succeeded if it wasn't for the intervention of the Wellcome Trust. He would have done a cheap hatchet-job sequence and everyone would have had to pay for it for evermore. And they would have had to pay him. Venter's methods were designed to get there first and were basically flawed, meaning that the data he would have made available would have been inaccurate and fuzzy as well as only available to rich people. And it was his genome he was sequencing of course. Venter the immortal. Anyway, the Wellcome Trust backed the good guys who did the job properly (it took much longer)and they put all the data on the web for free, for everyone, for evermore. Venter was blown out of the water and his nasty greedy company, Celera, went bust. His name is like a pigeon's arsehole and so is he. He might well be the antichrist. Cunt.
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