J. Craig Venter is a highly prominent synthetic biologist and entrepreneur whose research into the human genome and cellular biology has placed him as one of the main public faces of this rapidly unfolding field.
I just recently came upon www.fora.tv which, for any of those who do not know it, really promises to tickle the fancy, and to kill the time. It seems that they have done a very good job positioning themselves as a major repository of lectures and intellectual discussions by forging content relationships with universities, think tanks, public forums and cultural institutions.
That said, I found Fora by way of this presentation (see below) given by Craig Venter about the recent history and future trends of synthetic biology. For those who may have missed it, we are rapidly approaching the moment when, entirely novel forms of life can be designed on a computer and brought to life through a combination of DNA sequencers and other laboratory techniques. This has doubtlessly started to cause much in the way of both ethical concern and concern for the possibility of garage biohackers designing all sorts of killer bugs.
The exciting part was we took this piece of DNA and inserted into the bacteria E. coli and what had happened was E. coli recognized this as a piece of software and started making viral particles. And true to form in nature when the viral particles were released from the cell. They turned around and killed the bacteria that had made it. So, this is a process that we see all the time in nature. I was just speaking to oil executives and I said they clearly understood that process. But this was pretty exciting: just taking a piece of DNA and having it activated, making viral particles. So we view this as the software actually building its own hardware. This is an important concept as we’re trying to go forward in this field, that even most people that are working in this area have not truly grasped the implications of this, that we don’t have to design life from scratch. We just have to design the software appropriately. [link to the presentation video - many of the latter chapters are of particular interest]