John Craig Venter grew up in suburban San Francisco during the 1950s and ’60s, a rebellious second child who boycotted spelling tests and earned barely passing grades, but who excelled as a competitive swimmer and as a builder. At 14, he made an eight-foot motorized hydroplane boat and sailed it on San Francisco Bay. “My thinking is all in words — nothing visual,” he told me. After high school, as Venter relates in his 2007 autobiography, he moved to Southern California to attend junior college, drink, chase women and bodysurf, but enlisted in the Navy after receiving his draft notice. An IQ of 142 earned him a chance to train as a medical corpsman. Soon, the 19-year-old former slacker was doing spinal taps and liver biopsies and running an infectious disease ward at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. Facing deployment to Vietnam as a combat medic, an assignment he knew carried a high mortality rate, he requested an alternative posting to the Navy hospital in Da Nang.
Vietnam transformed Venter. He watched soldiers his own age die. He survived shelling and rocket attacks, and fought depression by surfing and sailing. After five months, he attempted suicide at age 21 by swimming a mile out to sea. An exploratory bump from a shark sent him flailing back to shore. “When you learn that your life is the biggest thing you have to lose, it makes you less afraid to tackle” other challenges, he says now.
In December, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues recommended the new science and the federal policies for regulating it be developed in tandem, to minimize potential risks to health and the environment. Although environmental organizations such as the Worldwatch Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund have described the use of living cells to make biofuels as promising, other groups argued that the commission should have called for stringent regulation of life forms made through synthetic biology. Critics expressed concerns about misuse of the new scientific techniques — for instance, to make disease-causing organisms — as well as the chance that accidental release of synthetic life forms could produce environmental damage.
“Each of these is going to be completely novel,” says Eric Hoffman, a biotechnology policy campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “As much as the industry says that these things aren’t going to get out, once you start working at a commercial scale, it’s going to be impossible to prevent them from escaping.”
Venter agrees that federal and private oversight will be needed, although he says it would be far easier for evildoers to use an existing microbe as a bioweapon than to create a new one. “The hardest thing to do scientifically, even imaginably, would be to create a new pathogen,” he says. He maintains that the environmental risks can be minimized by engineering protective features into synthetically altered cells. He plans to engineer suicide genes into his oil-producing algae cells, lest they escape their ponds and generate their own oil spills.
“I consider myself fundamentally more of an environmentalist than many of these environmental groups,” he says. “We have to come up with new sources of food, new sources of water, new sources of energy. Trying to ignore leading-edge science and technology as a means of getting there is an ostrich approach of burying your head in the sand.”
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Vietnam transformed Venter. He watched soldiers his own age die. He survived shelling and rocket attacks, and fought depression by surfing and sailing. After five months, he attempted suicide at age 21 by swimming a mile out to sea. An exploratory bump from a shark sent him flailing back to shore. “When you learn that your life is the biggest thing you have to lose, it makes you less afraid to tackle” other challenges, he says now.
In December, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues recommended the new science and the federal policies for regulating it be developed in tandem, to minimize potential risks to health and the environment. Although environmental organizations such as the Worldwatch Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund have described the use of living cells to make biofuels as promising, other groups argued that the commission should have called for stringent regulation of life forms made through synthetic biology. Critics expressed concerns about misuse of the new scientific techniques — for instance, to make disease-causing organisms — as well as the chance that accidental release of synthetic life forms could produce environmental damage.
“Each of these is going to be completely novel,” says Eric Hoffman, a biotechnology policy campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “As much as the industry says that these things aren’t going to get out, once you start working at a commercial scale, it’s going to be impossible to prevent them from escaping.”
Venter agrees that federal and private oversight will be needed, although he says it would be far easier for evildoers to use an existing microbe as a bioweapon than to create a new one. “The hardest thing to do scientifically, even imaginably, would be to create a new pathogen,” he says. He maintains that the environmental risks can be minimized by engineering protective features into synthetically altered cells. He plans to engineer suicide genes into his oil-producing algae cells, lest they escape their ponds and generate their own oil spills.
“I consider myself fundamentally more of an environmentalist than many of these environmental groups,” he says. “We have to come up with new sources of food, new sources of water, new sources of energy. Trying to ignore leading-edge science and technology as a means of getting there is an ostrich approach of burying your head in the sand.”
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