In the 1970s, when scientist J. Craig Venter was working on his doctorate at the University of California, he was told: "Basically it would be difficult to come up with any new discoveries in biology because everything was already known."
Recounting that story to the oil industry in Houston last February at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates' 20th annual CERAWeek conference, Venter laughed.
"Probably 99% of the discoveries in biology that will ever take place, remain to be made," he countered.
Venter knows because he is awash in discoveries, having worked with hundreds of international scientists on the project to sequence the human genome, a project with such promise for discovery that, as he says, "You can close your eyes and almost pick randomly out of these databases andUsomeone has to work at it not to make a new discovery!"
Genomes, clean energy
Venter was recognized in December 2000 by then-US President Bill Clinton as "one of the two most important players in the worldwide effort to map the human genome." He founded and heads the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation and three not-for-profit organizations including The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA).
TIGR and IBEA researchers seek to discover new organisms—Venter estimates that less than 1% of species on our planet have been discovered—and analyze known autotrophic organisms that metabolize carbon or create hydrogen, and to develop new synthetic cells for use as biological fuel cells.
IBEA has three initial goals: "development of synthetic chromosomes-organisms, carbon dioxide capture, and biofuel development." Hamilton Smith, who received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for isolating the first restriction enzymes, is scientific director of IBEA.
"We are searching for new, more-efficient ways to capture energy from the sun, to capture [carbon dioxide], and produce hydrogen," Venter said. "A key part of our effort is to engineer new enzymes, new cellular pathways, new chromosomes, and new species that will devote only a tiny portion of their cellular energy toward survival and increase by orders of magnitude the amounts released for other purposes such as powering fuel cells."
The US Department of Energy last year awarded the group a 3-year, $3 million grant for synthetic chromosome development, and 12 scientists are now working on that.
Venter said he envisions "a novel, CO2-fixing, engineered organism" that would be ideally suited for use in specially designed 'scrubber units' adjacent to power plants that emit CO2. The organism would capture the CO2 and convert it into biopolymers for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, Venter said.
"We plan to engineer photosynthetic bacteria or algae to make hydrogen production the dominant reaction," Venter said. "Success will depend on engineering cells to short-circuit the normal photosynthetic process and on engineering more-robust hydrogenases."
Speeding the action
This science and technology is moving at an amazing velocity. Massive amounts of data continually are being input into a supercomputer—the third largest in the world—which Venter and his associates developed out of frustration with the sluggish pace of the original government project.
Mathematician Granger Sutton created a unique, very accurate mathematical algorithm for the project, a new paradigm requiring more than half a million lines of computer code running on the supercomputer. It took 6 months to program the computer with the new TIGR "assembler," but the results are gratifying.
The computer's greater sequencing ability and storage capacity allows TIGR to dramatically expand its research and speed its pace, said Claire M. Fraser, TIGR director and president.
The group already has mapped key human pathogens such as malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, meningitis, and influenza. They also are seeking to alleviate pollution via the CO2 sequestration and autotrophic organism development, and they recently developed a successful genomic fingerprint of the microbe that causes anthrax.
"That research has the potential to treat diseases, alleviate pollution, deepen our understanding of many organisms, and heighten the defense against possible bioterrorism," Fraser said.
Venter added: "It once took 10 years and 1,000 scientists with public funding to decode one genome, a project that now would take less than a day with our modern methods. Gene hunts that once took scientists like me decades to decipher can now be done in mere seconds from a desktop computer."
Only a decade ago, this scenario seemed too futuristic to contemplate, he said, but today it is commonplace. "It is not science fiction."
