SPEAKER

J. Craig Venter Chairman J. Craig Venter Institute

J. Craig Venter, Chairman of the J. Craig Venter Institute, presented cutting-edge scientific technology. Dr. Venter had spoken at CERAWeek 2003, and since then, he said, ?we are looking at science in a very different way.? Biology, like data transmission, digital storage, and computer processing technologies, he said, changes at an exponential rate.

?Designing and synthesizing life? is a new phase of biology, which aims through metabolic engineering to synthesize genes and create species from them. Dr. Venter and his team use the 10 million genes of simple life forms that they have found in the oceans, the air, and various species as ?design components of the future.? Study of them led the team to decide to try to synthesize chromosomes, which led to the questions of whether chemistry would permit the synthesis of such large and complex molecules and whether one could ?boot up? synthetic chromosomes to create new species from them. Synthesis is proceeding; Dr. Venter cited the example of the successful synthesis of a bacteria-killing virus?s DNA, which was booted up into e. coli. The e. coli read the genetic code of the DNA and generated the virus, which turned around and killed the e. coli. He referred to this as ?software building its own hardware.? More recently, he has worked on synthesizing larger, bacterial DNA. To boot up the bacterial chromosome, the team developed a process of transplanting the DNA into another cell, the genome of which is completely replaced by transplanted genome.

Dr. Venter then described applications for energy. He predicts that in the next 10 to 15 years some of the technologies his organization has been working on could disruptively transform the energy industry. He cited the problem of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions changing our atmosphere. The conversion by microbes of the carbon in coal into methane, for instance, could have a huge impact on the industry. The biology works without engineering and is currently limited by scalability. Similar microbial processes could be used to break down oil sands and tar sands. There are also microbes that convert CO₂ into methane, which would make CO₂ a renewable source of carbon and could transform stored carbon into an energy source. He and his team are working to mimic these organisms? pathways in the laboratory. Other possible applications include capturing the sun?s energy in photoreceptors based on those in some ocean organisms that use the sun as a source of energy and microalgae as a source of oil. The hurdles for these technologies are scalability, cost, and efficiency. Second and third generation biofuels are within a year of readiness for scaling up.

With all that is going on in his field, Dr. Venter believes that ?things are going to start changing even faster than they already have.?