Craig Venter: Pushing Biotechnological Boundaries

Nov. 29, 2007 — -- Craig Venter is having what he called his "biggest year in science." He is a scientist, a sailor and more than anything else, a revolutionary. Many have never heard of him, but he's the man shaping your future.

"Science is really trying to understand life at its most basic level," he said. "And to me nothing else has mattered. I mean the best facts that we can get and the truth."

The truths Venter has uncovered are historic. He was at the forefront of decoding the human genome and he's recently become the first person in history to publish his entire genome on the Internet.

And now he is on the verge of another historic breakthrough -- creating the world's first artificial life form.

At his laboratory in La Jolla, Calif., Venter and his team are creating a new species, made not by nature, but by man.

"We're creating a new chromosome chemically in the lab from scratch that will result in altering an existing living cell to create a new species, a new variation of life," he said.

Venter and his team have manufactured a simple chromosome, a sequence of genes and proteins, a new strand of DNA, that they will put into a cell. The cell will divide and a new life form, a bacterium, will have been created.

"We're not creating life from scratch in the test tube," he said. "We're creating new life forms by creating new versions of the genetic code."

So what will this new life form do? Fuel your car. Or your home. Another might scrub the skies of greenhouse gases.

"We have some biological fuel cells that can live off of human waste," he said. "Produce clean water and produce electricity. So bacterium life forms are far beyond what we commonly view life in terms of human terms."

It's an astonishing prospect -- the cutting edge of biotechnology. Creating life forms to fuel and clean the planet. A new era.

However, we've seen similar progress in the past. And it is well known that triumphs of science can be used for good -- or evil. In Venter's case, there is some fear that he's opening Pandora's box.