Craig Venter Creates Artificial Gene

J. Craig Venter has taken a significant step toward creating life from scratch. What will he do with it?

Image: Evan Hurd Archive/Getty Images

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While the world's leaders gathered at Davos last month were nervously chatting about the subprime crisis, rising oil prices, and roiling stock markets, geneticist Craig Venter crammed into a Swiss phone booth and talked to National Public Radio's Science Friday and others about creating the first artificial chromosome.

How are a Swiss ski resort, economic angst, and designer DNA connected? Venter's announcement brought the world one step closer to a breakthrough that, among other things, could replace petroleum, natural gas, and coal with cheaper fuels churned out by manmade bugs.

That's right, we're talking about a bacterialike organism that could be programmed like a computer to use its cellular mechanisms to produce not only a gasoline substitute, but also drugs, plastics, and "pretty much any other chemical that DuPont can now produce," says Venter.

In other discussions Venter has told me that his synthetic bugs might provide solutions for creating cleaner fuels, and for cleaning up greenhouse gases.

"We're the disruptive wild card out there," he says with a kidlike glee in his voice, a tone that comes whenever Venter, who co-sequenced the human genome and is the essence of "disruptive," gets excited.

Venter's wild card stance is not just about science. He also has been known to be disruptive in business. In 1998 he founded Celera, a commercial effort that sought to beat out the publicly financed effort to sequence the first human genome.

Using Venter's novel technologies, the Human Genome Project was accelerated and completed early, with the public and private sectors declaring a tie as to who won the race.

Venter left Celera in 2003, but not before amassing a personal fortune that he's used to finance the J. Craig Venter Institute and other ventures. In the synthetic-life field he has already filed for patents should his team succeed; in 2005 he co-founded Synthetic Genomics with economist Juan Enriquez to commercialize whatever designer bugs emerge from the lab.

"All fuels come from biology," he explains—not from a phone booth in Davos, Switzerland, but from his office in Rockville, Maryland, home of the Venter Institute. "Fossil fuels come from ancient biology, a 100-million-year process. We're talking about speeding up this process considerably."

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