SXSWORLD

Designing Organisms to Save the World: J. Craig Venter's Software of Life by Bill Simmon J. Craig Venter is trying to save the world. If his cur- rent work is successful, the implications could be profound for food, fuel, medicine and, by extension, humanity. Dr. Venter is a biologist and entrepreneur who lately has been engaged in an attempt to design new life forms. That is, he is trying to create syn- thetic biological organisms that are designed—at their DNA level—from the ground up. The potential uses of this technology are impressive. Imagine designer microbes that generate clean fuels in vast quantities, or new strains of flu vaccines that can be developed in hours rather than months. It may seem like science fic- tion, but Venter has earned a reputation for delivering major scientific breakthroughs. He was among the first scientists to success- fully map the entire human genome in the 1990s. More recently, his team created the first "synthetic life form" in a laboratory. The team did this by engineering the DNA code of an entire bacterium genome and inserting it into an existing cell, which then took on the traits coded in the synthetic DNA—sort of like writing your own operating system and booting it on an existing computer. Indeed, Venter accepts this analogy. "DNA is the software of life," he says. Venter does not adhere to the typical scientist stereotype. He is a millionaire entrepreneur who has successfully merged science and business. He helped found the for-profit company Celera Genomics in the late '80s, which managed to sequence the human genome faster and more cheaply than the publicly funded Human Genome Project. After leaving Celera, Venter co-founded a new for-profit enterprise, J. Craig Venter Synthetic Genomics, which, along with the not-for-profit J. Craig Venter Institute, works on creating new synthetic life forms to pro- duce clean fuel and biochemicals. Despite his amazing breakthroughs, achieving some of Venter's major goals could take some time. "My goals might be different than ExxonMobile's," he says, referring to the work his research teams are doing in the field of biofuels and that is funded in part by the oil giant. industry to start using carbon dioxide as a raw material and ulti- mately replace as much fossil fuel as possible. "Replacing a billion gallons of oil per year would be a small contribution," he says. "Doing The main goal, according to Venter, is to get the petrochemical 24 SXSW ORLD / F EBRUAR Y 2011 it in large volumes is a huge challenge." He admits that replacing five to 10 percent of the world's fuel with biofuels in 10 years time is a "massive goal." More immediate benefits from Venter's research may come in the form of flu vaccines. It presently takes several months for scientists to generate a viable flu vaccine once the World Health Organization identifies the season's flu strains. But Venter says he and his team could conceivably "synthesize [vaccine] DNA in less than a day," shrinking to 24 hours what now takes three to five months. "You can lose a lot of lives in that three-to-five-month period," he says. And Venter says such technology may only be two or three years away. Vaccines for trickier bugs such as HIV and Ebola, will take longer: "10 to 15 to 20 years on these other things," he says. One may think that devising biological remedies for both global warming and global pandemics would be enough for your average millionaire-businessman-scientist, but Venter has his sights set on overpopulation, too. "There are three people alive today for every one in 1946, the year I was born," says Venter, who adds that the population is expected to grow from its current 6.8 billion people to 10 billion in the next 40 years. He says that by designing new biology from scratch, scien- tists can help provide food sources for Earth's growing population. "Providing food, clean water and fuel to all those people is one of the greatest challenges to ever face humanity," he says. For all his laudable goals, Venter's work is not without controversy. Generating new life forms in a laboratory evokes all sorts of mon- COURTESY OF THE J. CRAIG VENTER INSTITUTE

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