Craig Venter: Rock star of Biology

 That is, if you are willing to concede that biology has “rock stars.”  Today I went and saw Craig Venter speak on the University of California Berkeley campus and it was a ridiculous talk to say the least.  In case you don’t who he is, he was one of the pioneers of private industry that competed with the US government in the sequencing of the human genome in 2000 and he recently has started his own company where they are attempting to basically sequence everything they can get their hands on.  Why is he a rock star you ask?  Well after the sequencing of the human genome in 2000, he had the gall to attempt to patent large regions of the genome – insane you might think, but to Craig Venter it seemed reasonable.  Unfortunately, the US Patent Division is pretty dumb when it comes to science and doesn’t realize that genes, the building blocks of our genome, are in fact nature and therefore cannot be patented, granting Venter and others patents to genes.  Read more here.  He even commented today that when he was on the Colbert Report (twice, actually) that he told Stephen that he must have “three balls if he was crazy enough to go against the US gov’t” for the human genome.  He continually has occupied headlines with a government funded sailing trip around the world, where he literally would stick a bucket in the ocean and then sequence all the DNA that was in it even though it contained thousands of different organisms.  This obviously would make most scientists angry because he gets all this attention (and funding) to sail around to collect buckets of sea water.  And of course he made sure to stick to warm water areas – why bother going to the Arctic for sea water? His sea expedition did return a lot of useful information – one of which being that they discovered ~5 million new genes through this gene sequencing expedition.  This doubled the size of the list of the current known genes that exist in any organism.  Finally, he was in the news last month for his work on synthesizing, from scratch, the first full genome of a bacteria (NYT article here).   He talked about how he wants to be able to design and engineer bacteria in such a way as to produce whatever you want, ie fuel sources.  He casually mentioned that he recently gave a talk at an oil company about the prospect of alternative fuel sources, etc.  This was all said in a 200+ person lecture hall that was standing room only, and he never actually presented any data, it was only these lofty conclusions and ideas – where its ridiculous that anyone these days would be invited to give a talk at a major university and carry himself with such swagger.  In conclusion, he’s a rock star because he’s on the news pretty regularly, continually challenges the “norm” of science, and has the balls to try to patent sections of the human genome.