Welcome to the Biology Nut's Blogsphere
posted by bionut @ 18:13
1 comments
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
About Me
- Name: bionut
- Location: Fairfax County, Virginia, United States
Getting older and feeling my joints explode with the drops in temperature.
1 Comments:
"Venting" about Craig Venter
Today's Business section, Washington Post 2/27/2006, the front page article "J. Craig Venter's Next Little Thing" talks about another economic investment...er..invention....er..
interest....er...ego boost direction for J. Craig Venter. Mr. Venter is the one who raced the government to be the first to entirely sequence a genome (at first) and then the first human genome. Our government predicted it would take 10 years, Venter did it in 5. The man is brillant but, in my opinion (which counts b/c it's my blogspot), his motivation seems a bit off base. Venter wants to "invent" another source of energy by redesigning a microbe with additions of sea grasses and corn stalks. If we can manipulate the microbe gene, we can turn it into an ethanol producing machine and, in Venter's goal, have another source of energy. What's the problem? What is Venter's motivation? Greed? He's certainly capable when he tried to patent human genetic sequences (patterns in our DNA that code for something, like a disease or a certain eye color)-a typical schoolyard boy taking his ball home with him if we couldn't play by his rules. The government shorted him by making their information, albeit delayed, public knowledge. Venter has the team to do it (collecting former dept of energy scientists, bankrollers from crops/dry goods fortunes, and relying on research collected by DuPont). I say 3 cheers for the idea. I say "Boo" for the reasons behind it-personal welfare. Check out the article, maybe you will disagree. I like Venter's tenacity and if it weren't for him, the govt. would still be slogging away at the human genome project. But there's no need to push for success here, DuPont has been reseaching this topic since 1995.
Post a Comment
<< Home