Craig Venter decoded the human genome faster and cheaper than anyone else. He secured his place in the scientific firmament in 2000 when he nearly outran the U.S. government in the race to map the it.

He's the renowned physiologist who engineered the successful effort to sequence it, the "genetic software code" for human beings, which was published in 2001.

On September 4, 2007, a team led by Venter published the first complete (six-billion-letter) genome of an individual human - Venter's sequence.

Ventor's next goal - is to replace the petrochemical industry with biofuels! If successful this could be the alternative energy of the future.

By manipulating chromosomes he envisions creating an energy bug; a bacterium that will ingest CO2, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel. If he and his team are successful this will be the energy invention of the century.

commercial organism that converts co2

Dr. Venter says, eventually, these life forms could be designed to make biofuels and absorb greenhouse gases.

"We are in an era of rapid advances in science and are beginning the transition from being able to not only read genetic code, but are now moving to the early stages of being able to write code," he said.

Multiple fuels of the future are going to be created by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels like diesel fuel and gasoline.

The refinery for the bacterium would be large, bacteria-processing fermenters, similar to how wine and beer are made. The refining would be similar in some ways to ethanol production but with more complex molecules, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.

This fourth generation fuel type is generated from carbon dioxide CO2. "People want to bury that CO2 in the ground or pump it into oil wells or coal beds. We want to use that CO2 and the carbon in it to make new fuels."

"We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades. Basically everything we're making will work in the existing infrastructure."

They're designing fuels that have very little water in them, so that will solve the problem inherent with ethanol-water evaporation issues.

"The fuel-and-oil industry is a multi trillion-dollar industry, so I think there is room for dozens to a hundred solutions, each of which could create trillion-dollar industries. The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives. There are multiple billion- or trillion-dollar industries out there that new inventions will help spawn."

He was born October 14, 1946, Salt Lake City, Utah) and is an American biologist, and businessman.[1] Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research and was instrumental in mapping the human genome.[2] He was listed on Time Magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

He was the former president and founder of Celera Genomics, which became famous for running a parallel version of the Project of its own for commercial purposes, using shotgun sequencing technology in 1999. The method was blasted by the international genetics community who derided it as unfeasible. The aim of the Celera project was to create a database of genomic data that users could subscribe to for a fee. This proved very unpopular in the genetics community and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence and release it as open access. At the same time, the HGP consortium applied political pressure to appropriate the shotgun technology and the collected data from Venter's company. There were also concerns that Venter might shatter what was supposed to be an "international" face on a landmark event in history. DNA from 5 individuals was used by Celera to generate the sequence; one of the 5 individuals used in this project was Venter. In the end, Celera Genomics submitted to the pressure and shared its data and the credit for sequencing.[10] After his inability to collect royalties for it, Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002.[11] Venter resisted efforts by the company board to change the strategic direction of the company.

Despite their differing motivations, Venter and rival scientist Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping in 2000, along with US President Bill Clinton.[12] Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network. wikipedia

He discovered more than a million new genes and 1,800 new species by collecting microbes in the Sargasso Sea. Among them are organisms that thrive on carbon dioxide. Venter hopes to re-engineer some of these unique microbes genetically, into "designed species" that may reduce environmental CO2 levels, as well as provide new foods and energy sources. "Biology can do much more sophisticated chemistry than the best chemists," says Venter.


Sorcerer 2 Expedition Site

At the National Institutes of Health he was busily discovering brain genes, and the NIH wanted to patent them even before knowing what the genes did. W. Richard McCombie, a lab mate of his remembers him walking into the lab after the NIH decision and saying, "We're going to be rich and powerful beyond our imagination." (Another lab mate also remembers the quote, but Kowalski disputes it as a selective memory from a disgruntled ex-employee.) Almost immediately, a slew of critics railed against privatizing genes.


He has since come out against broad gene patents.


He left the National Institutes of Health for complicated reasons that included a front-page controversy over patenting genes. He founded TIGR in 1992.


Forbes

"According to Mr. Jurvetson, it might soon be possible to make new metal-based chemicals by "splicing" iron, aluminum or other atoms into organic structures that have been made possible by his genetic techniques. These new materials could eventually be used to produce parts for car bodies.
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"Within the next five years we are aiming to create products with trillion-dollar markets that use a series of novel biochemical processes to replace the products of the petrochemical industry," he says.

He is a leader in the field of synthetic biology, in which genetic fragments of plant or animal cells are manipulated to develop new materials."
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Among the substances that he is trying to create - mainly using plants as starting blocks - are new forms of jet fuels, plastics, substitutes for petroleum and chemicals that could absorb carbon dioxide from power stations to combat global warming.

Plant-based products could be easier and cheaper to develop than those based on chemicals derived from fossil fuels, he says. These developments could ease the world away from dependence on oil, natural gas and coal and pave the way to industries based on renewable materials, he believes.

This is a key step towards making a microbe from scratch, which could herald the creation of life forms in the laboratory.
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He says he wants in the next few years to organise 10 to 20 "corporate alliances". Big companies would join forces with his company on specific research projects in exchange for taking small stakes in the company.
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"What Craig is doing could turn out as important as what computer scientists were doing in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Jurvetson says.

"He is taking the world into a new era." "
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Source

Mycoplasma laboratorium is a planned partially synthetic species of bacterium derived from the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. This effort in synthetic biology is being undertaken at the Institute by a team of approximately twenty scientists headed by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, and including Craig V. and microbiologist Clyde A. Hutchison III.

The team started with M. genitalium, an obligate intracellular parasite which consists of 482 genes and 580,000 base pairs, arranged on one circular chromosome (the smallest of any known natural organism that can be grown in free culture). They then systematically removed genes to find a minimal set of genes that can sustain life.[1]

In 2003, the team had demonstrated a fast method of synthesizing one from scratch, producing the 5386-base of the bacteriophage Phi X 174 in about two weeks.[2] In January 2008, the team reported to have synthesized the complete 580,000 base pair chromosome of M. genitalium, with small modifications so that it won't be infectious and can be distinguished from the wild type. They named this Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0.[3][4]

Once a version of the minimal 381-gene chromosome has been synthesized, it is intended to be transplanted into the nucleoid of a M. genitalium cell to create M. laboratorium. The team had demonstrated the process of transplanting a (non-synthetic) from one Mycoplasma species to another in June 2007.[5]

The resulting M. laboratorium is expected to be able to replicate itself with its man-made DNA, making it the most synthetic organism to date, although the molecular machinery and chemical environment that would allow it to replicate would not be synthetic.[6]

The Institute filed patents for the Mycoplasma laboratorium (the "minimal bacterial") in the U.S. and internationally in 2006.[7][8][9] This extension of the domain of biological patents is being challenged by the watchdog organization Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration.[10]

He hopes to eventually synthesize bacteria to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, and also to absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. George Church, another pioneer in synthetic biology, holds that E. coli is a more efficient organism than M. genitalium and that creating a fully synthetic one is not necessary and too costly for such tasks; he points out that synthetic genes have already been incorporated into E.coli to perform some of the above tasks.[4] wikipedia

"Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it. Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could make."

"It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum..." C.V.

In June of 2005, he co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a firm dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce ethanol and hydrogen as alternative fuels - biological energy inventions.

It was founded in part by himself. His previous company, was a driving force in the race.

The firm takes its name from the phrase synthetic genomics which is a scientific discipline of synthetic biology related to the generation of organisms artificially using genetic material.

"The fuel-and-oil industry is a multi trillion-dollar industry, so I think there is room for dozens to a hundred solutions, each of which could create trillion-dollar industries. The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives. There are multiple billion- or trillion-dollar industries out there that new inventions will help spawn.

Right now oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion. I envision maybe a million micro-refineries. Companies, cities and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel. This would eliminate a lot of the distribution problems and associated pollution."

The refineries can be built where the crop is produced. Brazil produces ethanol right at the site of the sugar production, so they don't have huge transportation costs, and they recycle a lot of the waste to help fertilize the next crop.

"I think there will be unique solutions for each country and each region. Places with lots of sunlight and near the ocean could be great sites for our fourth-generation fuels, where all we need is sunlight, seawater and carbon dioxide to create fuels. There are literally hundreds of different possible solutions out there that could be uniquely adapted to each country and each region based on what works for their economy.

We know what's happening from adding CO2 to the atmosphere. We're playing a very dangerous game by adding more and more CO2-it's like playing Russian roulette with the planet. So reducing the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere is very clearly a positive thing. If humanity can match that challenge, it would be a very important step towards our long-term survival." C. V.