Craig Venter Pushing The Genome Envelope

Craig Venter is always in the news although it’s been quite a few years since the human genome was sequenced partly through his efforts. The Atlantic January/February 2007 issue has a feature on his new goal of creating “a microbe that will free us from our addiction to oil.” It’s also a nice summary of the history of the Human Genome Project.

Genomic research, after all, doesn’t just offer scientists an opportunity to take apart the genome of a human being, a mouse, or a bacterium to see how it works and what it does. It offers them a chance—if they’re sufficiently ambitious, or hubristic—to change what a genome does, and to make the organism do what we want it to do. And one of the obvious things we might want organisms to do for us—they already do it for their own purposes—is produce energy.

If you’re not an Atlantic subscriber and want to read the whole thing, email me at hsien@b5media.com and I’ll send you a link that’ll allow you to access the article for a few days.

Tags: craig venter, genome, energy, oil, atlantic, genetics, genes, dna, diseases, illness, health, biofuel, human genome project