Venter's Origin of the Species

Wired Magazine's August cover issue has a report on J. Craig Venter's latest venture. After his shotgun mapping of the human genome, and being kicked out of Celera Genomics, Venter went away to lick his wounds. The scientific world had scorned his approach, which was basically to profit from human genes. The scorn was probably more for his ego however -- it's quite large, and Venter went about making himself a star, much to the contempt of his peers. Now, Venter, with his Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives is out create life from scratch and catalogue all the genes on the planet. Why all the genes on the planet? To start, it's a noble goal. Species are disappearing faster than we can catalogue them. Most of the life on Earth are bacteria and other microorganisms -- some of which challenge our current methods of classification -- and most haven't been identified as yet. Back in March, Venter's team discovered 1,800 new species and identified more than 1.2 million new genes from a sampling from the Sargasso Sea -- that find immediately doubled the number of known genes. Even more shocking, Venter made his find freely available on the public genetic database, GenBank -- and promises to do so from his current two year trip around the world to take samples and catalogue the genes found. So where does this all take us? The creation of new life for specific purposes. Venter's Sargasso's find alone identified 800 new genes that are involved in converting sunlight to energy. He plans on developing a method of creating new life based on specific genes to do everything to creating energy to gobbling up pollution.